Just testing out some new features in WordPress 2.6

Very cool. WordPress is now Gears-enabled. It is something about caching frequently-used files, code and stylesheets locally so that you end up working partly offline and everything is quicker.  It also gives you the ability to add a “Press This” button to your browser.

I’m not sure if “Press This” is part of Gears or not, but you can be in Youtube watching a video, then use the button to bring in a pop-up window with a blog post screen already populated with the video you are watching. It embeds it in a Flash format rather than what I have been doing.

Very convenient.  Must see how it works with Flickr: I have never really got on with the built-in ‘blog this’ function of Flickr.

Caption thingie test

The other nice new feature is the ability to add captions to images, similar to how they appear on Wikipedia pages. One slight problem is that the theme I am using has a stylesheet that over-rides it a bit, so the effect is not as great as it should be.  I might have to do some investigating and tweaking during my holiday, maybe learn a bit along the way.

For a change, the pictures look great in the editing window, aligned nicely with a grey box around them, and the caption inside grey box, but in the actual theme there is no box.

Oh.  And there is a word count too. It does not seem to increment as you type, but its still nifty.

On the admin side, there is a little bubble to tell you if there are any updates for plug-ins – like the bubble for comments awaiting moderation that appeared in the last release.  Also the plugin page is now in two sections, keeping the enabled and disabled plugins separate.  So far its all looking good.  I am tempted to change the theme to a more up-to-date one that can cope with all the current features properly, but I rather like the clean aspect of this one, and really like the random image across the top.

Mind you… I inserted the code for that in the header, so it shouldn’t be too hard to put it in a different theme, as long as it was still 970 pixels wide to suit all the images.