Tech Tips and Tricks

Wordpress 2.6 is out and has some awesome new features. The new features can now make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

WordPress is taking the auto-save feature to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system. This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.

Press This! Post from wherever you are on the web

Now, Wordpresss sports a “Press This” bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog. For example, 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.

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6;

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Security

Ryan Boren got some more details about the new added security feature in Wordpress 2.6. Now, Wordpress includes better support for visiting the admin over SSL. Part of this support involves making sure authorization cookies are delivered only over SSL-encrypted HTTPS sessions. To accommodate this while still allowing the option of visiting the admin over plain http, 2.6 moves from a single cookie setup to a three cookie setup.

define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

You can visit the Secret Wordpress API page to generate unique codes on every visit.

More;

• Read more about the Wordpress 2.6 release.
• Wordpress 2.6 security details.