WordPress – Heading into 2006 at high speed.

WordPress is arguably one of the best blogging packages out there. From it’s full list of features to its many themes and plugins, it seems to have it all.

The past few weeks were big for WordPress and they are starting the new year with a bang.

On November 21st they opened up WordPress.com to the public, meaning that now anyone is free to sign up for a WordPress blog without having to install the software. I feel the free hosting was added to compete with Blogger, however, WordPress.com blows Blogger’s free service out of the water with better usability and more features.

On December 20th, it was announced that WordPress is now available on Yahoo! This time targeting businesses. Yahoo offers complete setup and maintenance of a WordPress blog as part of its Small Business hosting packages.

Then, to top it all off, WordPress 2.0 came out on December 26th.

Some of the new features include

• Updated Internal Workings (to speed up posting, pinging and database queries)
• A Rich Text Editor
• Redesigned Admin
• Ajax Lists and Categories in Admin
• Multiple Blogs
• Better Image/File Uploading
• And probably more that I’m overlooking.

Over the past few weeks, WordPress has expanded its blogging software to help meet the needs of everyone. WordPress.com for the average user, Yahoo Hosting for small businesses and an updated/upgraded software package for power bloggers to install on their own servers.

With all this momentum, what will 2006 bring for WordPress?