WordPress.org today announced the release of WordPress 3.6, featuring a new blog-centric theme and a revamped revision browser. You can download the new release now from WordPress.org/Download (it’s 5.2MB).
Dubbed “Oscar” in honor of Canadian jazz pianist and composer Oscar Peterson, WordPress 3.6 features more than just a new theme and improved revisions. Oscar includes better autosave and post locking, native support for audio and video embeds via an HTML5 media player, as well as improved integrations with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.
The newly added user features are as follows:
- The new Twenty Thirteen theme puts focus on your content with a colorful, single-column design made for media-rich blogging.
- Revamped Revisions save every change and the new interface allows you to scroll easily through changes to see line-by-line who changed what and when.
- Post Locking and Augmented Autosave will especially be a boon to sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Each author now has their own autosave stream, which stores things locally as well as on the server (much harder to lose something) and there’s an interface for taking over editing of a post.
- Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds with no reliance on external services.
- The Menu Editor is now much easier to understand and use.
For those who prefer a more visual version, here’s a video:
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Developers also get a few goodies:
- A new audio/video API gives you access to metadata like ID3 tags.
- You can now choose HTML5 markup for things like comment and search forms, and comment lists.
- Better filters for how revisions work, so you can store a different amount of history for different post types.
- Tons more listed on the Codex, and of course you can always browse the over 700 closed tickets.
New features aside, we recommend upgrading to the latest version from a security standpoint alone. With WordPress powering almost one-fifth of the Web, it’s a very big target for attackers.
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See also – WordPress now powers 18.9% of the Web, has over 46m downloads, according to founder Matt Mullenweg and WordPress is 10 years old today: Here’s how it’s changed the Web
Top Image Credit: Bill Owen
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