WordPress 2.6 is out. It’s cool. Take a look:

I’m most excited about automatic tracking of changes to posts and pages, but I’ll also probably come to like the “Press This” feature:

if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post.

The theme previews are a great feature for MU users, and 2.6 now makes it easy to put captions on images.

In addition to the note yesterday about the option to change the location of the wp-content directory and wp-config.php file, there are a number of new constants that developers may want to be aware of:

• WP_POST_REVISIONS
• AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL
• WP_CONTENT_URL
• WP_CONTENT_DIR
• WP_PLUGIN_DIR
• FORCE_SSL_ADMIN
• FORCE_SSL_LOGIN
• SECURE_AUTH_KEY
• AUTH_KEY
• LOGGED_IN_KEY
• WP_MEMORY_LIMIT

Ryan Boren posted a great overview of changes to cookies to improve security and accomodate the SSL features. In addition to paying attention to the new wp-config.php and and /wp-content/ locations, I’ll need to be aware that SSL and the new, more secure cookies may also conflict with some sloppiness in my old code. I’ll need to be sure I’m using admin-post.php, admin-ajax.php, and options.php where appropriate, rather than posting to my own files directly (this also eases the difficulty of people moving the wp-content directory around).

Ozh’s tutorial explains the details, but the short story is that we’ll soon get WP_CONTENT_URL and WP_CONTENT_DIR constants. And this is more than just convenience, 2.6 allows site admins to put those directories anywhere they want, so the constants will be the only reliable way of finding that info.