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.

• 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.