Lack of time and digital laziness moved me to put my remaining WordPress powered blogs to the bleeding edge… I update them with a simple and short command in terminal: “svn up”
This does put me in a position where I face bugs every now and then, but that does not really bother me (yet).

Working this way and upgrading on a regular basis gives you some great insight (actually, you see the changes as they catch your eye by surprise) in the current development of WordPress.

I see some great and substantial changes coming for WP 2.6, as I cover right here:

FYI, the following details about the upcoming release of WordPress 2.6 are based upon unstable and development releases of WordPress. It is uncertain that these function actually make it to the final version.

In Short: Upgrading through SVN

Ok, for those who do not know how to put your site on the bleeding edge and update through SVN, here are some screenshots of the simple steps once you have set up everything.

As database upgrades might apply, I have a bookmark for the final step to upgrade WordPress.

Check the WordPress Codex for full instructions: Updating WordPress with Subversion.

Google Gears

While some sources mentioned that Google Gears would be implemented for off-line posting purposes, as it seems now, WP 2.6 will be sporting Google Gears in order to speed up WordPress.

In the upper right corner of your screen, the option “Speed up!” has appeared. After clicking it, you are taken through the following pop-ups:

While most other blogs focus on the fact that indeed it does “speed up” the performance of WP, I still keep in mind that it can relate to the possibility of off-line posting. As Chris Prince wrote on the Official Google blog:

The latest build of WordPress also integrates Gears, to improve performance, and to let users manage their blogs offline.

Well, we will see how it develops, but first impressions are great already.

Post Revisions

This is a one-man blog, but for the many multiple-writer blogs that are out there, this feature must be a true valhalla: Post Revisions.

Post revisions enables you to easily oversee changes in different versions of the same post by more authors, as well as the option to compare different revisions (with very nice colors! Yeh!).

For more information: check this post by WP-developer mdawaffe: Post Revisions in WO 2.6

Theme Live Preview

I noticed that a simple yet more user-friendly feature was also added to this future version of WordPress: Theme Live Preview.

So rather than that a theme is activated immediately when you click it, now you get an in-browser (without leaving the themes admin page) preview:

Shift-click selection

In this version, no matter where you are where you have checkboxes available in a list (comments, posts, etc), you can tick one, press SHIFT and tick another one way down the list in order to select those + those in and between. A nifty feature that offers some more flexibility while administrating your blog.

Press This

“Press-this” is a feature that IMHO will cause TUMBLR users to shift to WordPress.
Being an upgrade to Josh Kenzer’s “Quick Post” plugin and being integrated with WP, it offers some great extra speed to one’s blogging workflow.

Default Avatar Options

What wordpress.com already has, will also be available to the standalone versions of WordPress…

This will give some more color and variation to the gravatars! I have not updated my theme’s code to display them yet, but will do so soonest.

WordPress development updates

Some information on the development of WordPress and on running your blog with SVN (stable or a buggy yet interesting developers’ version):

• WordPress Development Updates (http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/)
• Using Subversion (http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Subversion)[for developers only]
• Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion (http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion)
  This also covers how to update your current version to the latest stable version
• WordPress Blog (http://wordpress.org/development/)
  Here you will find the sneakpeaks and official release announcements

I look forward to how WP further developments… what would you like to see in coming releases?

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