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.

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!

• 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.

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!

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.

New features include:

• Google Gears integration
• Press This! bookmarklet
• Wiki-like Edit Tracking
• Theme Previews
• Plugin Bulk Management
• Post Word Count
• Plugin Update Notification Bubble
• 194 Bug Fixes, Security Updates, and more!

If your concerned about upgrading to the newest branch of WordPress, don’t be:

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

Now, I’m off to start upgrading my WordPress blogs!

In the meantime, if you like to be on the cutting edge and test things, WordPress 2.6 Beta 3 is now available for download.   You can see a list of what is new with Beta 3 here.

Though I plan to take the day off, I did want to offer a quick note I ran across about WordPress.  I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention a post by Planet Ozh about what WordPress plugin authors need to know about WordPress 2.6.  The post covers changes to both the wp-content directory and the wp-config.php files and will likely force many plugin authors to update their plugins for WordPress 2.6. If you are the author of a WordPress plugin, you should probably check this out.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday!

A couple newly discovered WordPress 2.6 features:

• WordPress Auto-Upgrade
• Plugin Auto-Installation
• Theme preview

It is GREAT to see the WordPress auto-upgrade feature being built into the base WordPress install, and the other two are very useful features.  Click over to check out the other new features and descriptions for each.   Great work John!

• Track WordPress 2.6 Progress – Quick Online Tips gives some suggestions on how to keep up with the progress of WordPress 2.6.
• How to Create a Dynamic Sidebar – This is something we’ve covered on a couple different occasions here on this site, but I wanted to point out this post because I think Richard does a great job of explaining how to tell WordPress what to display on each page.
• Project M Finally Announced – Justin Tadlock finally announced the details of his Project M. It appears it is a theme club of sorts, but with a twist. Click over to get the details.
• Do It Yourself WordPress Theme – Hayes Potter has come up with an interesting idea by releasing a WordPress theme. Simply build your stylesheet and you are done.
• WordPress Tricks – Stylized Web offers some useful PHP code snippets for WordPress.
• Making Authors Template Page – Also from Justin Tadlock, this post does a great job detailing how to make a WordPress authors template page.
• Displaying Related Categories and Content in WordPress – Darren Hoyt shares the code he used to make this feature in his popular Mimbo Pro theme.