WordPress version 3.6 is coming! Mark your calendar – April 29, 2013 is the ‘current’ date set for the next release of WordPress. The release schedule (in case you are interested) can be found over at: Version 3.6 Project Schedule. That might be a bit more techie than you want to see, so let me break down some of the cool enhances and fixes that you can expect to see next month!
There is a new theme: Twenty Thirteen. “With Twenty Thirteen we’re taking a bold stance: this theme was meant for blogging, and it’s not a blank canvas. It comes pre-marinated with playfulness and warmth and opinions.” Take a peek at a demo of the new Twenty Thirteen theme here.
Overview: The focus of the version of WordPress 3.6 is “Content Editing,” paying special attention to editorial workflows, revisions, autosave, editing, and post formats.
Autosave and Post Locking: It was written, “I want, as a major 3.6 bullet point, that we should never lose posts due to expired cookies, loss of connection, inadvertent navigation (even if AYS’d), plugin or core errors on save, browser crashes, OS crashes, cats walking on keyboards, children drooling in keyboards, etc. I want people to trust WordPress with their posts. They should never fear that something they’ve spent time creating or editing should go away due to their mistake or ours or that of a third party. Mistakes and errors should be recoverable. I can’t stress enough how important it is that people believe this and have good reason to believe it.”
Do you use the Revisions functionality of WordPress? “Revisions are an extremely powerful tool for content tracking, but there are a few parts that need a little TLC. Ever since they were first introduced, there’s been a problem with proper author attribution on revisions, and we’re going to take a crack at fixing that in 3.6.”
The Post Formats UI feature is going to get worked on! As stated, “Post formats is going to be a major win for 3.6. It’s one of those features that has so much potential, but it really falls short in usability and honestly we haven’t really taken the time to truly show what it can do. We’re going to re-think the admin UI for post formats. The goal is to make post formats much more user friendly and then show them off with the 2013 theme.”
It looks like the way Menus get created will be changing a litle bit – in a good way! From the official blog for the core development team, “For menus we’re going to try to focus on some UI improvements. Menus work pretty well but users, especially the less-technical ones, are easily confused. We’ve seen them try to add menus without names because they see the “Create Menu” button before they see the menu name field, we’ve seen them add a bunch of menus instead of menu items because they’re unclear on the difference, etc, etc. The goal for the 3.6 cycle is to make menus a little more intuitive and user friendly.”
I am excited to see the changes as they come out! When we get closer to the date, I will let you know of more news.
Great early information, thank you.
Be on the lookout, Caro! I think it is going to be a very cool release!
(Thanks for stopping by!)
You are welcome! I’ve put the date in my calendar, do I don’t forget!
Caro –
When you log into your Dashboard, you will be told there is a new version and that you should update! You won’t be able to miss it 🙂
Before upgrading, just make sure you back up your site.
Thanks!
Thanks for the update Paul!
Its the Autosave and Post Locking for me. I’ve been adding blog posts to our website over the past month and already lost 2 posts through my own fault and then can’t remember all what I’d written, what a nightmare! So looking forward to this feature saving my life in future!
Only just foudn your website recently and finding it useful.
Thanks again
Have you tried written your post offline first? You can use something like MS Word (but don’t use any formatting) so you can save it on your computer frequently as you write it. When you are finished, you can paste it into your post. Good Luck, Tracy!
The simplest ideas are always the best! Wrote this in word lol