Well, it has been several weeks already since WordPress 2.6 came out and so far I haven’t seen any major problems pop up.   I think this helps show just how good of a job the WordPress team and other testers have been doing prior to each release.

Of course that doesn’t mean that there are a few minor bugs or complications that need worked out.   Today I noticed a post by the WordPress team that WordPress 2.6.1 is now in the Beta 1 phase, which means it should be live here in the near future.  You can check out the close to 50 fixes here.

The good news is that this upgrade will be optional, so people that aren’t having any problems or that have a large number of WordPress installations do not have to upgrade if they don’t want to.

Possibly my favorite feature introduced in WordPress 2.6 was the wiki-style document revisions.  You can now easily get access and/or restore old revisions.   It took a few days to get used to, but I have to say I really love it!

I’ve always felt that this feature was intended primarily for multi-author blogs and probably isn’t needed for most WordPress bloggers, as it only serves to grow your wp_posts database table.   If you are someone that would like to disable this feature, all you need to do is open your wp-config.php file and add the following code:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

This should restore WordPress to handling posts the way it did in the WordPress 2.5 branch and earlier!

I’ve always been a big baseball fan because I guess I am sort of a sucker for statistics.  This morning I just noticed a fun post over at Matt’s blog which talks about some WordPress 2.6 statistics, and thought I might share part of it here for our readers who might have missed it:

• There have been around 23 thousand downloads per day. (Of just the English version.)
• According to the update system there are 201 thousand blogs using 2.6 already.
• That’s about 9% of all known WordPress.org blogs in 10 days.
• The video in the announcement post has been viewed 665,080 times.
• There have been over 300 themes submitted to the new Theme directory, which launched just 6 days ago.
• In the same period (10 days) there were 579,871 downloads of 2,527 plugins.

As Matt also eluded to, I’m sure that WordPress 2.6.1 will in fact bring those numbers up over 50% as a lot of people like to wait for the first patch release to upgrade.

If you’ve already upgraded to WordPress 2.6, you might have noticed that WordPress handles images a little differently than the WordPress 2.5 branch and below.  The main change is that you can now use the alt field to add a caption, which will wrap a sort of caption below the image.

The problem I’ve had with this new setup is that it can cause some problems when trying to float your images due to the new class=”alignleft”, class=”alignright” or class=”aligncentered” elements.  The image will still move, but I’ve found the text won’t wrap properly around the image.

Thanks to a recent post from Sadish over at WP Lover, it looks like this problem can easily be fixed by by adding some code anywhere into your CSS stylesheet:

img.alignleft, div.alignleft {
float:left;
margin:0 0.5em 0.5em 0;
}
img.alignright, div.alignright {
float:right;
margin:0 0 0.5em 0.5em;
}
img.aligncenter, div.aligncenter {
text-align:center;
margin:0 auto;
}

This way the images should float and the text should wrap properly.  Thanks for posting the easy fix Sadish!

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that it looks like WordPress 2.6 is already available to people that choose to upgrade their WordPress installation via Fantastico.  

I’m not actually sure if availability varies by web host, so for the record I have only confirmed it with Hostgator, which is my web host of choice.