As I read through what’s “hawt” in WordPress 2.6, I saw three things that got me excited: Post Revisions, Press This, and Word count. Especially Word Count (those with PayPerPost — admit it, you are, too).

My excitement dampened somewhat. Let me start with Word Count. See, I used to have this plugin called Leprakhauns Word Count which counts the words on my post as soon as I click the Count It button in the Admin post form, so I was hoping the built-in Word count would work the same way. It didn’t. I have to save the post first, and only then will I see the number of words I have under the Save button of the post form. No big deal, you say? Then try saving your work on a crappy Internet connection. Saving my work just so I can see how many words I have in my post? I’d rather cut and paste them in MS Word and do the counting from there. Firefox’s ScribeFire add-on can do a better job of it as well; all I needed to do was to highlight my post, right click on it, select Count and countamagically does it for me.

Press This is a cool tool to have, although I do have a “but” for this (pun intended). You’ll need to add the Press This link from your Admin post form to your browser’s favourite links section, and when you see a web page you want to blog about, you just click on that browser link and it’ll bring you straight to your post form and automagically inserts a reference link to that page you just saw. BUT… now that I use ScribeFire, it practically does the same thing as Press This. Also, imagine if you own TEN blogs, which means you have to have TEN Press This buttons strewn all over your browser links bar — how confusing is that? And what if some of those blogs aren’t WordPress-powered? With ScribeFire, even if your blog’s on Drupal, MT, heck even Blogger, you’d accomplish the same result, and easier since all I have to do is to right-click and Blog It, then select which blog I want to publish to from the radio buttons of my ScribeFire form. (I told you I love ScribeFire)

I haven’t tried Post Revisions yet, but I see that this feature might be pretty useful for my Top Commentators Widget post.

With what excitement left in me, I still decided to upgrade WebGrrrl.net to 2.6 due to almost 200 bugs squished since the last version.

One thing that took me aback was the automatic insertion of NoFollow on my posts in the main page. Yes, Main Index Page, not single post. And, yes, posts, not comments. If you’re using Firefox and has either Greasemonkey or SEO plugin turned on, then you’d noticed those pink/red highlighted links all over my main page which means that those links have NoFollow in them. This means that link juice to those sites will only flow through single post pages. Is there any SEO advantage to having this by default, can anyone explain to me? And where in the Admin area can I switch it off if I don’t like it?

I’m still bummed that the Category option is still situated under the posting form in the Admin, instead of on the side as pre-WP 2.5 had. Am not crazy about the image uploading feature, either — still as confusing and less user-friendly as ever, but at least now there’s an option to go from Flash uploading to classic uploading, which doesn’t look classic at the least, just un-Flashed. And when can we expect to have the one-click WordPress upgrade function being built into WP? Not everyone is lucky to have Fantastico in their web hosting account.

I got to say, I’m getting more and more disillusioned with WordPress, which is not to say that I think it’s not the most powerful blogging and CMS tool in the world, ever. It’s just that the functions that have been built into each WP version, although useful functions at that, aren’t up to par with the its plugins counterpart. I started to notice this when WP introduced native tagging in 2.3, and I can’t help but compare it with Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Nothing’s perfect. I still love WordPress, in any case, just not in a ga-ga sort of way.

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