Preflight artifacts are available for testing: Artifacts of geoserver-release #157 : /distribution/2.26.2 [Jenkins]
There is a draft blog post here: release-2.26.2-anouncement by jodygarnett · Pull Request #243 · geoserver/geoserver.github.io · GitHub
There are a couple new features in this release so I would like to take a moment and have text and a screen snap to explain. Andrea if you are in position to thank appropriate parties for the new functionality it would be a good addition.