A post made yesterday by Ryan Boren points to the next, major release of WordPress could be launched as soon as tomorrow.

Version 2.6 has more fixes on the horizon, but there are a number of new features as well. Some worth noting are built-in support for image captions, support for Google Gears to increase page load time, and better notification of plugin updates in the WordPress Dashboard.

I have had a little time to install WP 2.6RC1 and give it a little bit of experimentation. For the most part, it’s not a huge departure from the latest version, 2.5.1, but the addition of image captions will be an added boost for many users who are not the best when it comes to adding such things by writing HTML and CSS into their posts. See a post on my personal blog that I made a while ago about using CSS to attribute photos in your blog posts.

Granted that any other major bugs are not found in this release, watch for WordPress 2.6 to land as soon as Monday, July 14, 2008. We’ll be paying close attention for sure.