WordPress 3.5 is out! Elvin has Entered the Building!

WordPress 3.5 has been titled, ‘Elvin’ to honor Elvin Hones, a drummer who played with Charlie Mingus, Miles David, and  John Coltrane.

This new release of WordPress 3.5  includes a fair amount of  usability updates – especially for  managing media and files. When you upload an image, a document, or a pdf, it gets handled via the Media Manager.

It is generally advisable to keep up to date with the latest version of WordPress (as well as plugins and themes). Many times there are security vulnerabilities addressed with a update, as well as additional new functions and features that will make your WordPress experience more enjoyable. In this case, version 3.5 is a major release, so some things will look much different than they did in previous versions. With a little playing around, you should have no problems adjusting.

You can view this video to see some of the highlights of WordPress 3.5:

With regards to Security updates and exposed vulnerabilities, there were not a lot of updated mentioned (but one that has caused some issues on a bunch of themes). I suggest that you update your site as soon as you can, but do it smartly and correctly since things have been reported to break.

First, it is not WordPress 3.5 that is broken. Parts of WordPress have been improved that necessitate some themes and plugins to need modifications. Think of it in terms of the airlines. In the past, you needed to show ID like a driver’s license to travel between the US and Canada. Today, you need a passport. It is a small adjustment, but one that is necessary so changes need to be made.

With that said, your themes and plugins may not work correctly until they are updated. And that, my friend, is why you need to update safely and correctly. The majority of plugin and theme developers are going to release updates quickly (if they need to be) – you may have an issue with some older plugins/themes that are no longer supported.

Before you take the plunge and update to WordPress 3.5, take a backup of your site (complete with all files, themes, plugins, and the database) and restore it to a test server – do this before you apply the upgrade to your real live site. You do not want to test this out live and find your site breaks (or worse, you cannot access it!) This is exactly what happened to a client – I received an email saying that he applied the update and it broke his site!

On your test site apply the upgrade and check to see that everything is working correctly!