WordPress version 3.6 is expected to be released within the next month or so, and we’ve been playing with the latest beta versions of it to see what’s new. Here’s what you can look forward to:
A new default theme, “Twenty Thirteen”
Each year WordPress revises the default theme, but Twenty Thirteen will be a drastic change from previous versions. It’s loud, colorful, and makes great use of the new “post formats” that you can read about below. You can play with it a bit on the official Twenty Thirteen demo page.
Post Formats
A few themes already have special “post formats” in them, but now WordPress is making it official. These are shortcuts to create special kinds of posts, such as image posts, quote posts, gallery posts, etc. Having it built into WordPress will make things easier, though the theme you use will need to have support for them to really make the feature shine.
Audio/Video embeds
You can now embed audio and video files directly into your posts without relying on a special plugin or third-party service (like YouTube). You’re still typically better off to use a quality plug-in or service to help with those kinds of files, but now it’s no longer a requirement.
Autosave and post locking
The autosave feature now can help you even more – if your browser crashes, your computer dies, or the server goes offline as you’re saving, you won’t lose the your post. In addition, when you can see when someone is currently editing a post, and kick them out of it if they fall asleep at the keyboard.
Navigation Menus
The menu editing system that was added in WordPress 3.0 back in 2010 are amazing, and in 3.6 they get even better. It’s mostly subtle enhancements, but great little tweaks nonetheless. In particular, they now sport an accordion-based UI, and a separate tab for bulk-assigning menus to locations.
Revisions
Post revision history was added way back in WordPress version 2.6, and has been a lifesaver for the times that you mistakenly saved a bad version of a post and needed to go back to an older one. The enhanced revisions UI features avatars, a slider that “scrubs” through history, and two-slider range comparisons.
All in all, WordPress 3.6 has some great enhancements to make it even more powerful and easy to use, and we’re looking forward to seeing it released. It’s currently scheduled to be released on April 29, but that will depend on how smoothly the beta testing goes. If you’d like to test out version 3.6 for yourself, you can download the beta version here.
What are you most looking forward to in WordPress 3.6?
I like the format of different kinds of posts… that might be very helpful for my site. Do you think it will be compatible with my theme?
Probably not, at least not at first. The feature should work, technically, but really won’t show the various post types much different from one another.
Assuming a theme supports post formats, is easy to change colors, fonts, etc with css classes? BTW Mickey, much better profile pic than before.
I believe so, though I haven’t tried it yet. I can’t imagine that it’d be a problem, though. Glad you like the new pic!
It is interesting to watch the evolution of this fantastic product. Thanks Mickey.
Thanks for the highlights Mickey! I especially like the auto save as my computer locked up during my last editing session and I almost lost the whole post. How will we know if our theme has all of the functions you mention?
All themes will have most of those functions (auto-save, etc). The only catch will be with “post formats”. As a general rule, I’d say that virtually no existing themes will support it initially (such as yours, this one, etc), but new themes going forward will begin to.
Okay, the audio ability has me hooked. Thanks for sharing this,I can’t wait!
Oh so excited to hear about the video feature. I keep talking about how I want to add video but am yet to do so. Glad you noted though that it might still be best to link through YouTube. Not sure yet how to do that yet but I’m sure you have a tutorial somewhere!
Ahh, but of course I do! 🙂 Once you have the video on YouTube, it’s amazingly easy to embed it on your site. Here’s how it’s done:
http://www.abrighterweb.com/wordpress-how-to-embed-a-video/
Thanks for keeping us all up to date. v3.6 hear we come!
A great, flexible tool. How could I have ever done without this???
The video feature looks really interesting! Thanks for sharing!