Matt Mullenweg has announced WordPress 2.6, the latest update to the popular blogging & podcasting platform.

Five Hot Changes In WordPress 2.

• Press This! is back– this popular feature disappeared in an earlier update to WordPress, but is back with a vengeance. Inspired by Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious, and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, the Press This bookmark is designed to provide a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog. For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it will 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.
• Revamped image control – for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Better media support – You can now upload media when in full-screen mode, drag-and-drop Galleries to organize them and you can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• Gears Support – keeps a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of pages by several seconds. You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending.
• Post Revisions – lets you view who made what changes when to any post or page through an easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

These are welcome updates – and we’re excited about the upcoming iPhone WordPress app, too

Here’s the official video introduction to WordPress 2.6:

Here’s info on the rest of the updates:

• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Plugin update notification bubble
• Customizable default avatars