More Avatars?

At first I thought, new default avatars? What’s so exciting about this? (Avatar is the display/photo profile next to your comments).

Upon a closer look, WordPress 2.6 actually provides a uniquely generated avatar based on your email address, if you haven’t got a Gravatar set-up yourself!

Before, if you haven’t set your own Gravatar (in which you can set in under 1 minute), your display picture will show the “mystery man” avatar.

Now, I can choose automatically generated gravatar for you all! Unfortunately, you may not like it. Well, you don’t have a choice, unless you have your own Gravatar set-up

I can now select which avatars’ category to be generated for you

Some sample avatars generated by this new feature:

• Identicon
  
• Wavatar
  
• MonsterID
  

I chose the MonsterID as I think it’s quite cute to see what it can come up with. If you hate to be associated with a cute monster icon, then get yourself your own Gravatar :)  And No, unfortunately you can’t choose what monster you’d want to be associated with as they are uniquely hash-generated. Read here if you want to know more about the algorithm or technology behind this.

Press This Shortcuts

Press this? Before you associate it with “Click this”, it actually has a different meaning. “Press This” is more like “Blog This”. If you are browsing a good site or news that you want to blog about, then having this “Press This” link on your Favorites or Bookmarks is very handy.

By clicking on it, a “mini” panel will be opened containing your WordPress “Write Post” screen - scaled down. This is useful if you want to quickly spread news about what you just saw/read.

Some other enhancements of WordPress 2.6 Beta 1:

• Plug-ins are organized better now  - grouping active and non-active
• Post Revision - not so useful for me though. You can view all your saved changes and also compare different revisions. CVS a la WordPress!
  

Bug fixes that I can notice:

• I can now upload multiple files in one go, just like what it’s supposed to
• I can now see the progress bar when uploading files

Problems:

• Heard of bugs when trying to delete plug-ins through the admin, so stay out of it if you can
• I still get the “Loading…” texts everywhere on my Dashboard
  
• Pressing ENTER for more new lines don’t actually add extra newlines on the paragraphs - formatting lost after saving
• Can’t select/insert/delete an uploaded image. Clicking on the “Show” on any image on the Gallery does nothing. You can get around this by going through the “Media Library” instead.

For a complete list of changes, please make sure you read it on the official release blog. To upgrade or not to upgrade, that’s a question that you have to answer yourself, unfortunately

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