We just recently finished updating most of the WordPress sites we maintain to WordPress 2.5, so our normal process would be to monitor for security issues and wait a bit before upgrading again.  However, in reviewing the features of WordPress 2.6 we may have to make an exception and upgrade sooner rather than later.  Seriously, it is like they read my mind and added the new features I wanted most.  Specifically:

(1) WordPress now tracks your revision history, so you can now revert to old versions of your posts should you desire.  This will come in handy.

(2) You can now add captions easily to your images in WordPress.  This feature is already present on the WordPress-driven CNN Political Ticker (see image on right for sample). 

(3) WordPress now allows you to preview your themes before publishing them to your blog.  At The Bivings Group, we have dev sites for all our client work so the lack of a theme preview has never been an issues.  However, being able to preview your design changes before making them live is huge for people running personal blogs who don’t have the benefit of a development environment.

(4) WordPress has launched a posting bookmarklet, which allows users to post to their blog directly from their browser.  Basically, now as you browse the Internet you will be able to click on a Press This link in your bookmark area to quickly post a video, photo, snippet of text, etc. to your blog.  So, according to the WordPress blog, “if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post.”

I’ve used Tumblr for my personal blog for a long time, mostly posting quick links, quotes, pictures and videos.  Frankly, the Tumblr bookmarklet, which is a clear inspiration for the WordPress version, is the only reason I’ve been able to keep up a personal blog.  It basically takes the static out of posting – essentially allowing you to read and post in one motion.  While the idea is clearly borrowed from others, this is a great new feature for WordPress.

Below is a screenshot of the WordPress bookmarklet.

Anyway, this seems like a great release.  Check out the WordPress announcement post to learn more.

Below is a video providing an overview of new features.