If you are an IIS or i18n user, we’ve fixed a few annoying bugs that might be bothering you depending on your hosting setup. If you are an IE user who uses Press This, we fixed some image insertion problems for you.

Check out all the 50 fixes. The changes in the new version would include,
* Allow disabling password reset per-user.
* Query functions allow a comma-separated list of post_status values.
* Several more link generation bits are made SSL-aware.
* Advertise the Atom 1.0 feed in the default theme.
* Atom API uses the newer WP authentication functions.
* Fix for an object caching bug in plugin updates.

Download and test the WordPress 2.6.1 Beta1 (.zip)

• Comments API – This according to me is the most exciting feature, it will allow developers to create offline integration of comments management, where users could use desktop clients to manage comments (moderate, edit, reply, delete, spam, unspam).
• Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation – This feature will help users to quickly moderate comments using keyboard shortucts, so you can expect key combinations like Ctrl + S to spam a comment, Ctrl + A to approve and so on.
• Theme Update API – WordPress 2.5 and above have really made plugin management quite easy, you automatically receive notices when a new update to a plugin is available and can upgrade it without having to manually upload it to your FTP server. With this addition WordPress aims to bridge the gap between theme developers and the users for publishing updates to themes.
• One Click Plugin Installs – Installing a plugin will be much easier with One click plugin installs. A plugin with similar features called One Click Plugin was the winner of the Plugin Competition last year.
• WordPress core updates – This is a feature many users have been waiting for, with core updates you can easily upgrade your WordPress versions. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin performs the same task.
• Default Sitemaps – WordPress 2.7 will include a default sitemap creator, which will create Google XML sitemaps for your blog. Google Sitemaps Generator plugin is the best option available right now for creating XML sitemaps.
• Admin Panel Comment Replies - This plugin will help administrators to reply to comments using the admin panel. There are several plugins which allow you to do so right now, including WP AJax Edit Comments, Better Comments Manager and Absolute Comments.
• Comment Threading – This feature will allow users to reply to other commentators in a threaded manner, where replied comments will display below the actual comment, WordPress already has the ability to scale to accomodate threaded comments, without requiring database changes. Brian’s Threaded Comments is a does the job of allowing users to reply to comments.
• Subscribe to Comments – The WordPress team is also planning to include a option to allow commentators to subscribe to follow up comments, but this is marked as a question, so it may not actully make it into WordPress 2.7. The Subscribe to Comments plugin does the job to notify commentators on follow up comments.
• Widgets for Dashboard and Write Box – This feature will allow users to re-arrange the widgets on the dashboard and write page to suit their preferences.
• Batch Editing of Posts – This feature will allow users to batch edit their posts. Though there is not much information available about this right now, and I could not really find more from my research on the topic.

Be prepared for the next update. The release date for WordPress 7 has not yet been decided. Most likely to be released at the end of 2008. Till then enjoy the present cool features of the current version of WordPress.

Happy blogging with WordPress…

Courtesy: quickonlinetips.com

1. Akismet: Have this plugin installed on your blog as it filters samp comments made onto your blog. Akismet is the only plugin which most of WordPress users use and recommend. There are many more plugins which can control spam comments but I recommend you to use this. One of THE best…
2. Contact form: Use a contact form plugin on your blog. This helps visitors on your sites to be in touch with you regarding your blogs feedback/support or if someone would like to contact you if they are interested in advertising on your blog. You can see mine in action here. I suggest you to use Contact Form 7 or Ajax Contact Form.
3. Google Stiemap: Very much essential. Just add a link of your sitemap generated by Google Sitemap plugin of your blog either on your top navigation or on your footer. A must do it…
4. Permalink Structure: Most important. By default the permalink structures are set as page id ( http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123 ). So you need to remove this and add /%postname%/ in your custom structure field. At some cases you also need to edit the .htaccess file to make this tweak work. And also make sure your .htaccess file permissions are set to a minimum of “644″. For more info refer the codex.
5. All in one SEO: This is a plugin which helps you to tweak your blog with titles, keywords, descriptions and much more. Here’s a caption.
   

   All in one SEO

These are the most important you things/tweaks you need to do as you start a new WordPress blog. But not only these, there are many more plugins that you need to run your WordPress blog easily.

I have made a list of all of them here at Plugins for WordPress that are must.

Happy blogging with WordPress

Image courtesy: http://wp.uberdose.com/

Here’s what Matt said today;

We’ve gone through great lengths to make this as painless as possible for theme authors. You don’t need to know anything about Subversion (our back end magic takes care of all that for you), just login with your WordPress.org username and password and go to the upload page. From there you upload your regular theme zip file and we take care of the rest.

Once you upload your new theme we do a few automated checks for some of the requirements for each theme. If we find one that you missed we’ll provide you an error and description of what needs to be fixed. When a theme upload has been accepted we’ll send you an email and put it in the queue to be reviewed, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After the theme has been approved you’ll get another email letting you know that the theme is now live.

The Beta 3 included these features,

• Image captions
• Yet more inline documentation
• “Add Media” buttons for the RTE full-screen mode
• Theme Preview fixes
• Gallery sorting fixes
• I18N fixes

And now the RC1 features would include,

• Media uploader and gallery improvements
• Image caption and image editing fixes
• Press This fixes
• Ability to toggle between the flash uploader and a regular browser uploader
• Notification bubble on the Plugins menu when plugin updates are available

See the full list here: Full list of features of RC1

Download the RC1 here.

The features we slated for 2.6 have been in the repository for awhile now, so we’re going to start our beta cycle in preparation for a mid-July release.  Get Beta 1 here.  2.6 isn’t a big release like 2.5 was, but it has a few new features for you.

The features included will be,

• Post Revisioning
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Caching of static files with Gears for faster Admin page loads
• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• XML-RPC API for changing blog options
• Better SSL support for the Admin
• Hierarchy-aware paging in the Manage Pages and Manage Categories admin pages.
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

Download and test it…!

Courtesy: Ryan

Akismet: This plugin is the most widely used. What it does is that it blocks all SPAM comments from your blog. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. A great plugin for the ones who have raining comments on their blog…

All in one SEO pack: This plugin enables or optimizes your blog search engisn by

• Defining your home page title, description and keywords
• Defining your post, page, category, archive, tag and search title formats
• Using categories for META keywords
• Avoiding indexing of duplicate content (prevents indexing of category, archive and tag archive pages)
• Autogenerating of descriptions

Click here for more info.

Google Sitemap Generator: This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. This plugin auto upadtes your sitemap everytime you edit or delete any posts.

WP Super Cache: This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. More info here ~Author

Contact Form (cforms II): cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page! more…

WordPress Security scan: Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.

TinyMCE Advanced: Must needed plugin which adds more 15 sub-plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras.

WP-Polls: This plugins allows you to add polls in your blog. Not recommended but very useful…

Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button:Lets readers share, save, and bookmark your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and all the rest. The button comes with a drop-down menu that appears on rollover. ~ Author

AdSense Manager: AdSense Manager is a Wordpress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets. Recommended if you want to generate revenue from your blog…

Simple Tags: No synopsis. Click on it to know more/download it.

Last.Fm Records: This plugin shows cd covers on your Wordpress weblog. It connects to last.fm and grabs the list of cds you listened to recently and tries to find the cover images at last.fm. To speed things up, it only fetches these data once a day and keeps a local copy for the rest of the day.

WP-Gravatar: This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. But thats not all, click here to know more features about it.

CommentLuvass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This has 99% of chances of getting/attracting more comments on your blog.

Get Recent Comments: This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. This too would help attract more comments on your blog.

Advanced Category Excluder: This plugin was born because there was a no other real alternative to enable CMS like functionality in WordPress. The main goal was, to enhance WordPress’s functionalities, to hide some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog. ~ Author

More to come… Keep visiting…

New Features:

• Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
• Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
• Add paging of Themes in Design panel
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet
• Add sorting to gallery
• Export/import post excerpts
• Theme Previewer
• Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
• Show when a term is both a tag and a category
• Wider Profile fields
• TinyMCE 3.1
• Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

Here’s a video tour of 2.6 to see what the changes are…