WordPress 2.6 is a little over two months and a week (give or take some time), so it is important to see what the system will bring forth to bloggers in the future and the overall direction that blogging may take.

In the past week, WordPress celebrated its 5th anniversary/birthday, in which time the blogging software has grown to be one of the largest, if not largest, both free and self-hosted providers for bloggers.  WordPress MU was also updated to version 1.5.1, which includes a series of bug and security fixes and takes it to the same level as WP 2.5.1.

WordPress 2.5 was released on March 29, so we are currently in between update cycles.  As you may know, WordPress 2.5 was a major upgrade from the previous version with built-in Gravatar support, a complete redesign, tagging support, and other security, interface, or usability fixes.  With WordPress 2.6, more bloggers will be looking for the addition, or re-addition, in some cases, of features that didn’t make it into the current version, or were taken out.

Track WordPress 2.6 Progress at the Following Locations:

WordPress Codex: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.6
WordPress Trac: http://trac.wordpress.org/milestone/2.6

Features Expected to be Added to WP 2.6

  • The wp-config.php file will be able to be located one-level up from the rest of your WordPress install if you want to move it out of the doc root.  This may allow multiple WordPress installations to share the same configuration file or perhaps serve as a backup folder.  [Update Post]
  • Google Gears will be supported.  This doesn’t necessarily meant that you will be able to blog/post offline (there are already some forms of offline publishing), but that you may be able to speed up your blog by storing your files off of your web server, on your computer.  For the most part, it would be more on the admin’s side.  A user experimented with the feature and was quite impressed with the speed boost it gave.  [Trac, Trunk] 
  • Users will be able to choose a default Indenticon, or Gravatar for their image.  Currently, only WordPress.com users are able to change their Gravatar, unless you go through the Gravatar site.  [Update Post]
  • Posts revisions will be supported, in wiki-style fashion.  This is a huge feature, allowing bloggers to recover posts if their browser crashes or some other calamity happens.  [Trac, Update Post]
  • Shift-click checkbox selection will allow users of WordPress to select a range of checkboxes in the category, tag, comment, post, page, and media administration selections by checking the “start” checkbox, holding the Shift key, and then selecting the “end” checkbox, in a similar fashion to GMail.  [Trac]
  • Post word count, a feature that is currently on WordPress.com, and will likely work in the Visual view, Code view and tinyMCE (plain) view.  [Trac]
  • Quick posting via a bookmarklet-type pop-up, called Press This.  It would make posting news stories, videos, or other post excerpts  from across the web even easier, with pre-filled information.  [Trac, Example Plugin]
  • Paging of themes in the Design panel.
  • Gallery sorting through a drag-and-drop type area.  [Update Post]
  • You will be able to export and import post excerpts.
  • Theme previewer (similar to the current WordPress.com).  
  • Terms will show whether they are both a tag and a category or not.
  • Profile fields will be made wider.
  • Countless speed improvements.

Taking a look at the features, there are several that would reduce the need for additional plugins, which may be the direction that WordPress is heading.
The original features list is located here.
Demo WordPress 2.6

What is WordPress Lacking?

As WordPress continues to grow in users, what features do you think would benefit the most bloggers overall?  Which ones would you like to see added into WordPress 2.6 or future versions?

Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress, spoke about the current (2.5) at WordCamp Dallas and the future of WordPress (2.6 and so on).  [Video at YouTube]

3 Responses to “WordPress 2.6 Features”

  1. Raymonn Says:
    June 9th, 2008 at 9:13 pm

    I’d like to see a post expiry date. It would be great to have a post not show up when I decide it to. Good for music and events website.

  2. Charled Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 3:47 am

    An integrated more flexible users management : who can write in which page or which category.

  3. Claude Gelinas Says:
    August 1st, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    I second the excellent idea of an expiry date for the posts since some of the information published is time sensitive and isn’t relevant after a certain while — web publishers should be able to set this when they initially post their content.

Leave a Reply