WordPress 2.6 has been released. I only uploaded the beta version a couple of days ago  - and now had to upload the release version.

The good news is that it looks like a pretty clean upgrade from Vsn 2.5.1.

If you want to see what changes have been made, you can watch the following video - which covers the main features of the upgrade:

One of the nice additions is the introduction of Google Gears. For those of you who don’t know what this is - it is a Google innovation introduced to allow offline (local PC) storage of some of your information. Google first suggested using this for local storage of say a post - if your connection went offline while making a new entry - and then the Gears software would update the information when you came back online. Well the WordPress team have decided to use Gears for local storage of images and lookup tables. I can see the difference in the rendering of the tinyMCE toolbar - it’s much quicker on my laptop with this version.

If you use Fantasitico to upgrade your WordPress version, you’re going to have to wait a couple of weeks before your host upgrades - but when it does become available - I don’t think you should hesitate with the upgrade. I haven’t seen any red flags with the testing of the various components of WordPress on the test site that I set up.