Originally published on April 24, 2008. Updated on May 5, 20, 22, June 16, and June 20.
WordPress 2.6 may not be due until August 2008, but already I’ve managed to compile a list of features and enhancements that we’ll likely be seeing in this next major WordPress release. (I’ll continue to update this post as we approach the release date.)
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NEW (June 20): Admin SSL support — The WordPress 2.6 admin should be able to be visited via either HTTP (normal connection) or HTTPS (encrypted connection), with the option to make admin HTTPS mandatory. [via]
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NEW (June 20): Remote publishing disabled by default — Having the main avenue of attack for WordPress blogs be disabled by default will be great for WordPress security. [via]
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NEW (June 16): Theme preview — Theme preview functionality would allow you to see what a new theme would look like on your blog before you activate it.
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NEW (June 16): Theme paging — For those of you with a ton of WordPress themes (more than 15), you’ll be able to page through them in the administration. This should be especially useful for WordPress MU blogs that have large theme collections.
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NEW (May 22): Ability to move wp-config.php — In WordPress 2.6, you’ll be able to move wp-config.php one directory level below the public root. Perhaps this could also allow multiple WordPress installations to share the same config file?
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NEW (May 20): Google Gears support — Now integrated into the WordPress trunk (current working version), this feature will allow Google Gears users to experience a faster admin interface, and possibly manage their WordPress blogs while offline (how cool would that be?).
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NEW (May 5): Identicons — In WordPress 2.6 you’ll have the ability to select a default Gravatar for those who don’t have one.
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Post Revisions — Wiki-style revisions management for blog posts: a cool new power-feature, just announced on the WordPress Development Updates blog.
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Shift-Click Checkbox Selection — In WordPress 2.6, you should be able to select a range of checkboxes in the category, comment, tag, post, page, and media administration sections by checking the “start” checkbox, holding the Shift key, and then checking the “end” checkbox… Gmail style.
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Post Word Count — A WordPress.com feature that might be making its way into WordPress 2.6.
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“Press This” Bookmarklet — The bookmarklet (which existed in WordPress 2.3 and prior but was removed in WordPress 2.5) has returned, new and improved.
Thoughts? Ideas? Add a comment below!
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25 Comments
hm, this “bookmarklet”-thingy sound interessing
embedding content is always kinda… tricky… if you have 2 left hands with 5 thumbs on each of it 
Wow. That Bookmarklet on Acid thing sounds as sweet as apple pie. I would love to see that.
i’m really waiting for native OpenID support, i don’t need those checkboxes improvements!
A better custom fields management is welcome.
I would rather see all the current and past problems resolved than anything you listed here fixed first. No need for a new version unless these old problems are fixed.
Go browse the forums for many many people going there to get answers.
Sure there is a lot of responses, 60% of these are never resolved and just die.
Wordpress needs a more organized forum, better support, and resolve problems with current releases before planning anything newer.
Don’t get me wrong, I like WordPress,
(When it works)
I’d like to see the “page order” thing done. That has been sitting as “it’ll be better in future versions” for awhile–about time to fix it up?
The bookmarklet sounds amazing, as it will totally change some people’s views on blogs. At school people think blogging is all about ranting and doing long posts, yet it can be as simple as a video or a twitter-like update.
Speaking along the idea of twitter, it’d be great to have some kind of “feed importer” that goes and republishes posts. Tumblr has something like it. Not saying this would be able to make it into 2.6 (I don’t know how this would work, exactly–maybe wordpress.com could do something to this extent), but it would be cool.
@Mao-B and honest ape: I agree, the Press This bookmarklet is a cool idea; I hope it delivers.
@bardo: Since OpenID support is useful to only a handful of WP users, don’t you think that would be better implemented as a plugin?
@Giovanni: How do you think custom fields could be improved?
@Quick: Yes, it would be nice if the head WP developers did a thorough sweep of the Support forums to find and fix all pending bugs … but then again, I suppose that’s what Trac is for.
@JD Hartley: As for me, I vote for a drag-and-drop page reorderer!
Also, there are already plugins that can republish an RSS feed into WordPress — I’m not sure if it would be such a good idea to implement it into the core though, as it might encourage third-party content scraping.
I hope they put the word count in. That will be very useful!
I mean that More fields plugins should be added in the core of WordPress.
So excited that WordPress is being improved every single day!! Can’t wait for the next release!
Is the “shift-clicking” mean that i can edit mutilply posts at one time (just one click to submit ?)
Near as I can tell, the Press This bookmarklet was a feature they removed and recently put back. It just adds a quick link to your browser toolbar that pops up a slim write post area.
The bookmarklet is my favorite new thing in 2.6.
@Jenny: I personally don’t pay attention to my word count, but I’m sure it’ll be useful to some people!
@Giovanni: What plugins/functionality did you have in mind?
@Michael: I agree, the 2.6 release is looking to be very exciting indeed!
@awflasher: The “shift-click selection” means you can easily select a range of items using the Shift key. Though I don’t know if you could then spawn multiple editing windows for the selected items.
@Andrea_R: Thanks for the info — I know the original idea was the more ambitious description I had previously, but until I hear exactly what functionality the feature entails, I’ve given it a more generic description.
@Ian Stewart: Yes, the bookmarklet will be a cool feature. I’m sure it’ll be particularly helpful for bloggers who frequently repost content from elsewhere on the Internet.
This is amazing. Very useful for me!
Thank you so much.
thanks a lot
as suggested above, fixing the existing problems (most of which worked ok in 2.3 but got brought in in 2.5) is surely their priority. the custom fields bug (which forces you to save halfway through writing any post), the related one which saves multiple half-finished drafts for every post, and righting the cumbersome layout introduced into 2.5 surely have to be top of the list.
I got only one question, can it support chinese character?
I’m looking for the WP2.6 zipped file here. and I’ve got nothing
. I though u were host it on somewhere else places. The server site (WP.org) was down (maybe a lot of people download it now).
Darn
Btw, u have cool arrangement addsense here.
Exactly what I was looking for, this page is ranked high in google search results too, good job.
I got only one question, can it support chinese character?
I’d also like to see the word count feature.
Great info by the way – keep it up.
@DSvT and @Jocuri: Yes, WordPress can be set to use different languages.
Nice one. Good work!
The bookmarklet is my favorite new thing in 2.6.
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