WordPress 3.6, Oscar, the best news you’ve heard all week: whatever you want to call it, it’s finally here and we’re super excited.
We’ve been teased for weeks with its imminence, but now the new version of WordPress has arrived complete with a great new blog-centric theme and a bunch of great new features previously outlined by Mullenweg in his talk at WordCamp San Francisco. Here is an entertaining video shown at that very talk:
The main features include the bulletproof augmented autosave and post locking, revamped revisions browser, native support for audio and video embeds, improved integrations with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud and a new easier-to-understand menu editor. Developer features include new audio/video API, choice of HTML markup and better filters for how revisions work.
For anyone wondering who Oscar is, the version is named after the Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, following a tradition among the WordPress team for naming each updated version after a jazz great.
If you’re with WP Engine like us, this statement announced that the update will be installed automatically over the next two weeks.
See the full list of new features below:
User Features
- The new Twenty Thirteen theme inspired by modern art 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 (so much harder to lose something) and there’s an interface for taking over editing of a post, as demonstrated beautifully by our bearded buddies in the video above.
- 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.
Developer features
- 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.