As you may have noticed, WordPress 2.6 failed to meet its original release date (July 7th).   It looks like a few things weren’t quite ready, and one of the great things about this WordPress team is they usually make sure things are good before making an official release.   I believe the new release date is July 14th, which is next Monday.

In the meantime, if you like to be on the cutting edge and test things, WordPress 2.6 Beta 3 is now available for download.   You can see a list of what is new with Beta 3 here.

Once again the fourth of July is upon us, and for those of us in the United States, this marks a paid vacation day the day we celebrate our independence and freedom!

Though I plan to take the day off, I did want to offer a quick note I ran across about WordPress.  I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention a post by Planet Ozh about what WordPress plugin authors need to know about WordPress 2.6.  The post covers changes to both the wp-content directory and the wp-config.php files and will likely force many plugin authors to update their plugins for WordPress 2.6. If you are the author of a WordPress plugin, you should probably check this out.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday!

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t been talking a whole lot about WordPress 2.6 lately, it is because our friend John over at The WordPress Expert has been doing a great job keeping us updated on the latest features in the WordPress 2.6 branch.

A couple newly discovered WordPress 2.6 features:

• WordPress Auto-Upgrade
• Plugin Auto-Installation
• Theme preview

It is GREAT to see the WordPress auto-upgrade feature being built into the base WordPress install, and the other two are very useful features.  Click over to check out the other new features and descriptions for each.   Great work John!

Here are some great WordPress-related posts I’ve enjoyed over the past week:

• Track WordPress 2.6 Progress - Quick Online Tips gives some suggestions on how to keep up with the progress of WordPress 2.6.
• How to Create a Dynamic Sidebar - This is something we’ve covered on a couple different occasions here on this site, but I wanted to point out this post because I think Richard does a great job of explaining how to tell WordPress what to display on each page.
• Project M Finally Announced - Justin Tadlock finally announced the details of his Project M. It appears it is a theme club of sorts, but with a twist. Click over to get the details.
• Do It Yourself WordPress Theme - Hayes Potter has come up with an interesting idea by releasing a WordPress theme. Simply build your stylesheet and you are done.
• WordPress Tricks - Stylized Web offers some useful PHP code snippets for WordPress.
• Making Authors Template Page - Also from Justin Tadlock, this post does a great job detailing how to make a WordPress authors template page.
• Displaying Related Categories and Content in WordPress - Darren Hoyt shares the code he used to make this feature in his popular Mimbo Pro theme.

Now that WordPress 2.5.1 is out and people are pretty much used to all the new stuff we got from the double release, I think we can now start to look forward to WordPress 2.6.

If you are someone who likes alpha testing, you can now check out a live WordPress 2.6 alpha demo.

As of the publishing of this post, it looks like the newest feature is Google Gears support.  For those unaware of what Google Gears is, it allows you to work offline.  Several services including Google Reader already use it.

Thanks to Gabfire for the heads up on this!

This weeks batch of WordPress talk includes a number of great posts from the around the blogosphere. It is good to see just how many people are writing about WordPress!

• Bootstrapper has listed their 100 most usable plugins. I’m a sucker for lists like this and hopefully you enjoy them also. It is always fun to see what other peoples favorites are.
• Last week I collected your input on what you’d like to see on WordPress 2.6. It looks like Dan at WPCandy has collected over 30 ideas he’d like to see with WordPress 2.6. Talk about thorough! This list has a lot of great ideas that hopefully the WordPress team sees.
• Noticed some of your favorite WordPress features missing? The WordPress Expert has listed the 5 features removed in WordPress 2.5. Hopefully we can get these back for WordPress 2.6 (if not before).
• ThemeLab has explained how to setup a privacy policy on your WordPress blog. This is crucial for people that monetize their blogs with Google AdSense.