A few months behind schedule, version 3.6 of WordPress is now live to the world and brings several new and important features.
Dedicated “Oscar” to famous Canadian jazz pianist and composer Oscar Peterson, WordPress 3.6 features more than simply a new theme, overhauled revisions, native assistance for video and audio embeds, and included Spotify, SoundCloud, and Rdio support. In this article we will show you what’s new in WordPress 3.6.
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Twenty Thirteen – The New Default Theme
The WordPress developers have an aim to unveil a new default theme every year, and this year is no different!
WordPress 3.6 comes with Twenty Thirteen. Twenty Thirteen is a little bold and more colorful as compared to preceding three themes Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven, and Twenty Twelve.
It is designed to highlight the strength of post formats and all new functions of WordPress 3.6. It has a responsive layout and designed to be completely accessible so that it can also be used by people with unique needs.
New Improved Revision Manager
The entire post revisions function has finally received an essential update. It’s not a simpler to “go back in time” and examine your revisions and see what you’ve modified?
The new revisions guarantee to save every modification and deliver with a new user interface that makes comparison of two revisions a wind.
The post revisions manager provide you a comprehensive overview of the modifications between various revisions of a post, allowing you to scroll back and forth in time to see exactly what was modified, deleted, or added, and choose the right excerpts. You can also compare particular revisions against each other to see what was modified when.
A New User Interface to Create Navigational Menus
Many users usually found Menus complicated. Version 3.6 of WordPress brings a new and less complicated user interface to create and modify menus for your blog or website. It has two navigation bars (tabs), one for modifying menus and another to deal with locations. This new interface is user friendly, simple to use, and we think many users would discover it refreshing too.
Improved Autosave Feature
You will not have to get worried to lose any written content when working on a post. WordPress 3.6 shipped with improved autosave functionality. It perform an autosave task in every 15 seconds so you will never lose more than a pair of words or sentences if something unusual occurs to your computer or internet connection as you write.
The most prominent development to autosave feature is that it now use your browser’s storage together with database to save revisions. WordPress attempts to match the current revision with your browser storage that contain the backup and informs you if it detects any difference.
Post Locking
Post locking is another new feature in version 3.6 of WordPress. For WordPress websites with multiple contributors, authors and owners the new post locking feature is very helpful.
Simply put, it locks posts that are presently being modified so that another user can’t unintentionally start editing the same post at the same time. The user trying to access a post is notified that the post is locked and who is presently modifying the post, and provides an option to take over the post editing.
Log in Notifications
In some cases your WordPress session may expire while you are working. This could happen as a result of an expired or erased session cookie, administrator altering security keys, etc. In preceding versions of WordPress this intended that you will have to go back and log in again. This resulted into loss of unsaved and important changes. Version 3.6 eliminates this problem by showing log in popup-window with darkens the screen you were working at, when a user’s session expires.
Other Enhancements
- Added oEmbed support for Spotify and Rdio
- Audio and Video Preview on Edit Media Screen.
- Semantic Markup allow themes to choose improved HTML markup for Search form, comment lists as well as comment forms
- Search content for shortcodes with has_shortcode()
- Removed Aim, Jabber and YIM from user contact method.
- Introduced several functions for theme developer such as wp_registration_url(), and get_attached_media(),get_post_gallery() and get_post_gallery_images() etc
Obviously we did not cover ALL the new features added in Version 3.6, you can read more about WordPress 3.6 and what else it has to offer listed on the Codex. If you need to download a copy, just click here to grab it.