Update: Robert posted a comment pointing out an alternate demo site.

July 7 stretch with July 14 fallback

That’s pretty terse, but I’d interpret it to mean “we’ll try to get it done July 7; it would be a stretch though, so we’ll have July 14 as a fallback.”

Considering the new release date is only 2 weeks away, and the Trac only shows 12% progress on WordPress 2.6 so far, I’d say it’s likely that many changes previously planned for 2.6 will be bumped to version 2.7.

WordPress 2.6 may not be due until August 2008, but already I’ve managed to compile a list of features and enhancements that we’ll likely be seeing in this next major WordPress release. (I’ll continue to update this post as we approach the release date.)

• NEW (June 20): Admin SSL support — The WordPress 2.6 admin should be able to be visited via either HTTP (normal connection) or HTTPS (encrypted connection), with the option to make admin HTTPS mandatory. [via]

• NEW (June 20): Remote publishing disabled by default — Having the main avenue of attack for WordPress blogs be disabled by default will be great for WordPress security. [via]

• NEW (June 16): Theme preview — Theme preview functionality would allow you to see what a new theme would look like on your blog before you activate it.

• NEW (June 16): Theme paging — For those of you with a ton of WordPress themes (more than 15), you’ll be able to page through them in the administration. This should be especially useful for WordPress MU blogs that have large theme collections.

• NEW (May 22): Ability to move wp-config.php — In WordPress 2.6, you’ll be able to move wp-config.php one directory level below the public root. Perhaps this could also allow multiple WordPress installations to share the same config file?

• NEW (May 20): Google Gears support — Now integrated into the WordPress trunk (current working version), this feature will allow Google Gears users to experience a faster admin interface, and possibly manage their WordPress blogs while offline (how cool would that be?).

• NEW (May 5): Identicons — In WordPress 2.6 you’ll have the ability to select a default Gravatar for those who don’t have one.

• Post Revisions — Wiki-style revisions management for blog posts: a cool new power-feature, just announced on the WordPress Development Updates blog.

• Shift-Click Checkbox Selection — In WordPress 2.6, you should be able to select a range of checkboxes in the category, comment, tag, post, page, and media administration sections by checking the “start” checkbox, holding the Shift key, and then checking the “end” checkbox… Gmail style.

• Post Word Count — A WordPress.com feature that might be making its way into WordPress 2.6.

• “Press This” Bookmarklet — The bookmarklet (which existed in WordPress 2.3 and prior but was removed in WordPress 2.5) has returned, new and improved.

Thoughts? Ideas? Add a comment below!

According to the development ticket for the Google Gears patch:

The patch adds all static files used in the admin interface to a single offline storage. That speeds up page loading a lot, as it serves virtually all requests for static files from the computer’s HD instead of the network. So instead of 50-60 requests to the server on some pages, there are only 2-3.

Personally, I’m waiting for the WordPress 2.6 demo to be updated with a supporting alpha version so I can try Google Gears out. I just certainly hope it turns out to be more reliable than some other Google Gears implementations have been.

While I don’t agree with all the statements made (for example, I, unlike the post’s author, think that WordPress MU handles multiple blogs wonderfully), there are a lot of good ideas. I particularly like idea #15, a “theme library API”:

With an API, “premium” theme websites, such as WPDesigner’s Theme Club, PremiumThemes.net, and iThemes.com can let subscribers add their site to the WordPress admin for quick browsing of awesome themes.

Cool!

I might also incorporate an idea or two into a future version of WordPress Tweaks.