WordPress has started making videos for their releases again (at least for this release)! This time around, the 3.6 update is titled Oscar to “honor the great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.” See what’s new in 3.6 by watching the video or simply visiting their release page. Release notes after the jump.
User Features
- The new Twenty Thirteen theme inspired by modern art puts focus on your content with a colorful, single-column design made for media-rich blogging.
- Revamped Revisions save every change and the new interface allows you to scroll easily through changes to see line-by-line who changed what and when.
- Post Locking and Augmented Autosave will especially be a boon to sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Each author now has their own autosave stream, which stores things locally as well as on the server (so much harder to lose something) and there’s an interface for taking over editing of a post, as demonstrated beautifully by our bearded buddies in the video above.
- Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds with no reliance on external services.
- The Menu Editor is now much easier to understand and use.
Developer features
- A new audio/video API gives you access to metadata like ID3 tags.
- You can now choose HTML5 markup for things like comment and search forms, and comment lists.
- Better filters for how revisions work, so you can store a different amount of history for different post types.
- Tons more listed on the Codex, and of course you can always browse the over 700 closed tickets.
I can see how its going to affect WordPress sites especially those with multiple authors and editors. It certainly is helpful to know when someone is editing the article and what are the different additions or edits that person has made. The new post revision thing is pretty damn awesome too! Comparison between revisions sure is helpful especially when you want to see what’s changed. Great job WordPress team!
Nice to see them adding in more media features as well. I certainly won’t be using that much as hosting your own videos is going to be quite heavy on the server as well as on the bandwidth side of things.
Just a gentle reminder to backup all your files and setttings before updating! There might be some incompatibilities with your current plugins and whatnots. Have updated mine already, everything seems to be fine except for the few plugins that should have their own updates in time.
