Most WordPress maintenance releases to date are never anything that special to shout about, however this new WordPress 3.7.1 is something special. This is the first maintenance release where WordPress users don’t have to do anything to get their sites upgraded.
Every site already running WordPress 3.7 will be automatically upgraded to the latest and greatest without any intervention required.
WordPress 3.7 is already quickly approaching 2M downloads. That’s an enormous number of site admins who don’t have to worry anymore about logging in to perform updates.
WordPress core developer Andrew Nacin said that maintenance and security releases are probably going to be a more frequent occurrence now that they don’t have to worry about “update fatigue”.
This install only takes about 24 seconds to update on average, but that includes all the downloading and unzipping of the package. A core update should only put your site into maintenance mode for a matter of a few seconds.
This .1 maintenance release addresses 11 bugs in WordPress 3.7, including:
- Images with captions no longer appear broken in the visual editor.
- Allow some sites running on old or poorly configured servers to continue to check for updates from WordPress.org.
- Avoid fatal errors with certain plugins that were incorrectly calling some WordPress functions too early.
- Fix hierarchical sorting in get_pages(), exclusions in wp_list_categories(), and in_category() when called with empty values.
- Fix a warning that may occur in certain setups while performing a search, and a few other notices.
Anyone can update their site immediately or wait until the core team starts rolling out the automatic background updates.
We suggest you go crack yourself a cold beer and leave WordPress to do the work for you…
