Hot on the heels of WordPress 3.7, WordPress 3.8 is already growing near. It’ll be mostly a cosmetic upgrade, with lots of new styles and interfaces in the admin area. Here’s more about what you can expect to find in version 3.8 when it’s released in December.
MP6: A visual refresh of the admin area
The biggest change you’ll notice in WordPress 3.8 is the darker theme and streamlined admin area. The new design makes heavy use of the Open Sans font, cleaner styles and increased white space and is quite an improved look.
DASH: A redesigned landing page for the admin area
The main WordPress “dashboard” (the first page you see when you log in) hasn’t changed much in a long time. This update combines some items, removes some others, and makes it easy to quickly access the information you need.
THX38: New theme chooser and installation process
Along with a new admin design and dashboard, the theme installation page is also getting an overhaul. Because this page is designed to be very visual, they’ve reduced the amount of text on the page, increased the size of the images, and streamlined many of the elements of it.
Widgets Area Chooser: A redesign of the widget interface
If you have a lot of widget areas on your site, dragging and dropping widgets into them can be tricky when elements fall “below the fold”. This new interface will help solve that issue with a new process that makes things much easier to use. Here’s a short video that shows you how it works:
All in all it looks to be a solid update. We’ll keep you posted as a release date draws near.
