Wordpress 2.6. An improvement all around.
paan
17 July 2008
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Intro
For the past couple of days I ‘ve been breaking in the new wordpress 2.6. And all around I am impressed by the improvements of this version. But before I go to any details. The most obvious questions is of course “Should I upgrade?”. My answer to this is a big YES!. This main reason for this is:
- No compatibility issue
- Unlike the 2.3 -> 2.5 upgrade. This upgrade doesn’t change the theme and plugins architecture so you don’t have to worry about the plugins breaking or the theme breaking. If it worked in 2.5, it will work in 2.6.
- Security
- Along with the many bug fixes, wordpress now also adds SSL security as a core functionality. You can now force SSL connection to yout wp-admin. This might not be much but it is a step in the right direction security wise.
Basicly it’s an improvement all around and you have no reason not to upgrade.
Plugin Handling
Plugin handling have received a big overhaul in terms of usability. You now can mass activate or deactivate plugins, a featured that have been requested many times. This is very helpful when upgrading or debugging when you need to deactivate a lot of pluggins at once. Considering that a typical site will have around 20 pluggins this is a really big time saver.
Another thing that I really like about the new pluggin page is the pluggins are grouped according to Active plugins, inactive plugins and recently active pluggins. This is really useful when you need to reactivate those pluggins that you deactivated earlier. Instead of digging through the long list of deactivated pluggins, you can just browse the recently active group and clearly see which of the plugins that has been deactivated recently. Furthermore shift click works as you would expect and select a range of check box saving you even more time instead of clicking on each checkbox.
Wordpress recently active pluggin
You could see a little similarity between the functionality of the the new wordpress pluggins page with the PlugInstaller pluggin. And you will see later that this is a somewhat recurring theme. The developer has taken a useful functionality that a plugin provides, improve it and integrate it into the core of the system.
Post revision
Owh… I just love this. Your post will now have revisions. And what’s more you can pick any to revision and put it side by side to get a diff between the two versions.
Wordpress post revision - showing a diff of 2 revision
Very handy. I personally write stuff in bits and chunks, especially if I’m doing a how to. I’ll write down the major steps. And put in details and revise old sections as I go through the process of creating the how-to. Sometimes Stuff get lost because I deleted a section that I think I don’t need or something like that. But now with post revision it’s like you have a SVN for your post inside wordpress. Very cool.
Improved media uploader
I don’t use the media uploader much so I can’t say how improved it is now but one thing that I really love is the image caption functionality( as seen in this post). I used to use a image caption pluggin to do this. And I love it that they included it in wordpress.
Press this
This is another useful feature. You could drag a bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar and drag anything onto it and wordpress will add that item to a ‘basket’ so that you can insert it into your post. This works with anything from links to images and even youtube videos and flickr image. This is super useful while doing research for a post.
Theme preview
Now when you click on a theme in the design tab, wordpress will provide a theme preview ala wordpress.com theme preview. Wuuhooo…
Theme Preview
I absolutely love this. When I started to move from wordpress.com hosted blog to self hosted blogs I was surprise to find out that the theme preview I loved so much is not actually in wordpress. I search forever for plugins that can do this to no avail. Thanks wordpress team.
Google gears
With google gears what the wordpress team is storing all the images on your site and loading it straight from your harddrive stored cache. This makes surfing very fast especially in themes with lots of images. Google gears is very powerful and it’ll be interesting to see what else they will do with google gears and wordpress.
Summary
No backwards compatibility issues with pluggins and themes. More security. More features. Really, just update already. Good job wordpress theme for this release.
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