Check out the video: click here.

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• 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.
• Plugin 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.

Joining the “dofollow” movement for awhile I did certainly see an increase in comments but didn’t want to put up with moderating every comment because that’s a waste of time. Some people left great comments, others just a few words to get a link back. So instead of giving credit to useful commentators I punished everyone.

Now there is an answer to this dillema created by Lucia over at bigbucksblogger.com. She’s created a plugin that will allow dofollow on comments but conditionally and I like that a whole lot better then punishing everyone. So I’m once again in the dofollow movement but only under certain conditions… and they are:

You must have commented atleast 10 times for any of your comments to have the nofollow tag removed. The name you use in the name field must be shorter then 15 characters (this cuts out people leaving comments with a bunch of keywords in them). Trackbacks are not followed at all unless they have commented the same as mentioned above (this cuts out the trackback spammers).

When you leave a comment it will show a number next to your name indicating how many times you’ve commented in all.

I hope this encourages more discussion now, although I still have a problem with posting regularly and in a way that invites comments. I’m working on it!

What do you think?

Anyway, Shoemoney started using this on his blog to encourage people to comment and I think it’s a good idea. Basically it gives the top commentators a static link back to their site for taking the time to comment. I think it might attract more spam type comments,, ya know the ones like,, “nice site, visit my porn site”. Those get deleted anyway but if you do want your link to show up on my sidebar please comment on my blog posts. Even if it’s that you disagree with me.

I found the plugin via another site that I can’t remember at the moment. The Top Commentator Plugin works with wordpress 2.x +.

The Wasabi link or plugin I guess is down and not being supported until someone takes over.  The plugin that you see here used doesn’t take any manual manipulation.  You just upload the plugin to the plugins folder, add a snippet of code to your blog template and wammy! You got related posts or entries or whatever you call’em attached to your posts.

For those of you who want to select related posts manually I can’t help you.  Once your blog gets big or bigger it will be hard to select related entries since there will be so many so you might as well go with something automated I think.