WordPress 2.6 released today

The big new features?

• Edit tracking: Tucked way down at the bottom of each post is a revision history. You can see who changed what and when.
• SSL support for your administrative panel, plus the ability to force SSL logins. That’s critical if you frequently blog from public WiFi spots.
• Press This: Post links, YouTube and Yahoo! Videos with a couple of clicks. This bookmarklet will extract a URL, or video embed code and ready it for posting.
• Better plug-in update notification: Now you’ll see a bubble over the plugins link in the top navigation indicating how of your plugins have updates.
• Theme preview: the ability to see a theme on your blog before selecting it.

Also notable — though only for what it could mean for future versions of WordPress — is support for Gears. This version of WordPress only saves CSS and JavaScript files locally. I suspect future versions will also support offline editing as Zoho Writer does now.

The 2.5 branch of WordPress will no longer be maintained, making 2.6 a mandatory upgrade if you want to keep your installation current.

I upgraded today with no problems — at least that I’ve noticed. However, since 2.6 makes changes to your database, backup your data first.

Official WordPress announcement