SHACK WEST

We love WordPress. It’s our web publishing platform and CMS of choice. It’s a versatile, mature development platform with an extensive developer community.

The latest version, WordPress 3.6, has just been released. You can download it now.

Here’s what’s new:

Highlights

• New Default Theme – Twenty Thirteen
  • Focus on blogging
  • Single column layout with Sidebar / Widgets in the footer
  • Latest Theme Features support, particularly Post Formats
  • Font-based icons (Genericons)

• Admin Enhancements
  • Menus UI improvements
  • Revisions revised to be more dynamic and scalable
  • Autosave and Post Locking
  • Preview Audio and Video on Media Edit Screen
  • In-line login following expired sessions

• For Developers
  • External Libraries have been updated
  • New audio/video APIs give developers access to powerful media metadata, like ID3 tags
  • Filters for revisions, allowing you to set the number of revisions ad hoc instead of only via a define
  • Semantic Markup allows themes to chose improved HTML5 markup for comment forms, search forms, and comment lists
  • Search content for shortcodes with ‘has_shortcode()’ and adjust shortcode attributes with a new filter

Some of What’s New

General

• Use digraphs for German umlauts in ‘remove_accents()’
• Use Ellipses instead of …
• Consistently apply ‘register’ filter
• Automatically ‘esc_url()’ the URL echoed by ‘the_permalink()’
• Allow developers to specify an Accept-Encoding header in WP_Http::accept_encoding()
• Pass tag object and args array to topic_count_text_callback from ‘wp_generate_tag_cloud()’
• Use ‘wp_unslash()’ instead of ‘stripslashes_deep’
• Improve the performance of ‘backslashit()’ by avoiding regular expressions
• Disallow accidental or negligent deregistering of critical scripts in the admin. Covers jQuery, jQuery UI, Underscore, and Backbone
• Remove ‘the_title_attribute()’  from anchors with ‘the_title()’ as text
• Display username (user_login) rather than user_nicename in Toolbar below username

Posts

• The Revision Management UI saw significant improvement
• Shortcode attributes can now be filtered via shortcode_atts_$shortcode hook
• The ability to change post formats was removed from Quick Edit
• A ‘not_found’ label was added for non-hierarchical taxonomys
• Better UX for dealing with multiple users editing the same content (aka Post Locking)
• Audio/Video support: more info

Media

• Add ‘oEmbed’ support for Rdio and Spotify
• .webm (video/webm) was added to the MIME types list
• The Media Library can now be sorted by Author name
• Bug fixed where initial gallery link-to setting wasn’t applied
• Return from ‘image_downsize()’ earlier if a custom resize function is used
• Orientation information was added to items in ‘gallery_shortcode()’
• New Audio and Video previews are available on the ‘Media > Edit’ Screen
• Added ‘wp_audio_shortcode()’  and ‘wp_video_shortcode()’

Comments

• Improve ‘wp_list_comments()’ markup
• Add the ability to use HTML5 input types in the comment form

Appearance

• The Navigation Menus UI got a significant refresh
• The Customizer can now be accessed via the Appearance menu
• Screen options can now be added to the ‘Appearance > Widgets’ Screen

Plugins

• Prevent plugins from overriding jQuery in the admin
• Prevent plugins with certain filenames from breaking links in the admin menu

Users

• Remove the three default contact methods (AIM, YIM, Jabber) for new installs.
• Pass old roles to ‘set_user_role’ action
• The workflow for deleting users has been improved

Settings

• Allow any post format to be set as default in ‘Settings > Writing’ Screen

Accessibility

• Better keyboard/screen reader accessibility in the Nav Menus UI
• Background image’s “select a file” link works with keyboard navigation

Under The Hood

General

• Use official MIME types for Windows Media file extensions
• Redirect after save on options-permalink.php to ensure permalinks are fully flushed
• Only show database errors if both WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY are enabled

Bug Fixes

• Lots. Full list here.

Multisite

• Pass blog_id to the wpmu_drop_tables filter

Classes

• XML-RPC: Return an error for getRecentPosts (mw and blogger) if the user does not have edit_posts
• XML-RPC: Standardize home/site url labels with core labels
• Preserve alpha in ‘WP_Image_Editor_GD’ when images are not resized
• Make sure WP_Http funnels all redirect requests through  ‘WP_Http::request()’ to ensure the proper transport is used

Functions

• Over 30 new functions have been introduced for developers. Full list here.

Filters

• 11 new filters have been added in existing functions. Full list here.

Scripts and External Libraries

• Update to jQuery Color 2.2.1
• Update to Backbone 1.0.0
• Update to jQuery UI 1.10.3
• Services_JSON 1.0.3
• Iris 1.0.3
• hoverIntent r7
• MediaElement.js 2.11.1 (New)

Deprecated

• Deprecate ‘wp_convert_bytes_to_hr()’ in favor of ‘size_format()’
• Deprecate ‘get_user_id_from_string()’ in favor of ‘get_user_by()’ where `$field` is ’email’ or ‘login’

This feature list was sourced with permission from the WordFence developer team at www.wordfence.com.