WordPress 2.6 has been released, and the new feature list seems impressive.

Here is a quick list of the features that have been added to the new version of WordPress:

• Versioning control - you can now track and compare changes when editing an existing post
• Press This! - you can add a bookmark to your browser’s toolbar, which will automatically start a post with the content of whatever page you’re viewing when you press the bookmark. For instance, if you visit YouTube, you can use the Press This! button to automatically post the video you’re viewing on your blog
• Gears - I’m honestly not sure what this does, but it appears to be some sort of plugin for your browser, completely independent of WordPress, that allows you to cache common CSS and JS files while you’re browsing the Web
• Theme previews - you can now test drive a theme while you are developing it, rather than having to make it active to see what it really looks like
• Word count
• Image captions
• …much more

Here’s a short video detailing some of the updates. A higher res version is available in the official WordPress blog:

If you are using WordPress (like we are here at HTMLCenter and I am on one of my personal sites), it seems like it’s really worth it to run out and pick up the new version. If you’re not a WordPress user, now might be a good time to become one.

Let us know what you think of it once you get it configured.

Intense Debate is one of the new crop of comment replacement services. Basically if you have a blog, you can replace the default commenting system with the one that Intense Debate provides. While I am not a great fan of these replacement services yet, they are gaining in popularity because they offer additional services and functions that the standard blog commenting systems don’t.

I was able to grab some time with Intense Debate developer Austin Hallock and our interview transcript is below.

Allen: Can we start with a brief bio about yourself?
Austin: Sure, I’m 16-years-old, live and goto high school in Arvada, Colorado. I started in the ‘tech world’ when I was 12 building lame Geocities sites, and slowly progressed towards forums (phpBB), and then onto custom built sites that involved a lot more programming. I developed and ran two websites in 2004-2006 that I sold for $10,000 (quite a bit of money to a 15 year old), then moved on towards building another site that never really took off, before moving to Intense Debate.

Allen: How do you describe Intense Debate?
Austin: I think of Intense Debate as simply a better way to do comments. With most blog platforms, comments aren’t really focused on as much as they should be — comments can be what drives traffic to your blog, as well as what gets people to return and engage in a conversation. Intense Debate takes the standard comment system and enhances it to have threading, reputation, and a central storage house for all your comments (as well as a lot more, you can check out the new features we roll out here: http://intensedebate.com/blog/).

Allen: What’s your role with the company?
Austin: I’m one of 2 developers here, and when it comes to programming, I’ve mainly been working on the new features we release every week.

Allen: What’s the technology behind Intense Debate?
Austin: We use PHP5 and mySQL… pretty much the standard LAMP stack. To display our comments on blogs we use a combo of javascript, PHP and a bit of modified AJAX (to work across domains).

(more…)

I’ve recently become aware of an issue with managing comments in Wordpress 2.5. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if it’s simply a poorly implemented “feature”, but I’m going to call it a bug.

(more…)

The new version of WordPress has been released. It’s the 2.5 version and I just upgraded HTMLCenter. As a reader you should see the same experience as always. The backend admin has been completely overhauled and so far, it is damn smooth. Things are in some different places but it takes advantage of a variety of newer technologies and the posting tool is sweet. I am very impressed. There are tons of new features, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has an overview of all of the features.

Here are some other good reviews of Wordpress 2.5:

• Mashable
• Paul Stamatiou takes a look at the new gallery features