When I discarded my bespoke CMS and adopted WordPress as my blogging platform (see: Starting Over) I was surprised to find that most of the features I had painstakingly written for my CMS were available in either the WordPress core or one of the multitude of plug-ins that are available for it.

However one feature that I immediately missed was Version Control (or Revision Control). I was quite proud of the Version Control system I had incorporated into my CMS. Hooked into Subversion on the server, I could easily browse the entire revision history of any single document I’d published. I could also revert an existing document back to any previous version at a click of the mouse. It was a powerful and compelling feature and impressed everyone I showed it to.

Imagine my delight then when WordPress 2.6 was released with Revision Control as one of the headline features. I was further surprised by the implementation when I learned that WordPress’ Revision Control provides a facility to visually compare the differences between versions - a facility my own interpretation lacked.

It’s worth upgrading your WordPress installation for this feature alone, but there’s more… as this brief video illustrates:

To summarise, the new features in WordPress 2.6 are as follows:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add captions under your images.
• Bulk management of plug-ins.
• 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.
• Plug-in 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.

Kudos to the WordPress team for a job well done!