After much hoo-haa and sometimes seemingly endless delays, WordPress 3.6 “Oscar” has finally been released to the world at large.
Now it must be said that his version of WordPress has had a rocky road to finally be released months ‘late’, due to the creation, and later the removal of, the post formats UI. Although the supposedly flagship feature of 3.6 has been removed, there are still many other great things to enjoy with this release.
The latest version of WordPress, 3.6, is now available to the world and has load s of new featured wanted for many years such as bullet-proof autosave and post locking, a new look revision browser, native (built in!) support for audio and video embedding, and much improved integration features for Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.
Here’s the official video that shows off these shiny features:
[wpvideo UmhwbWJH]
Why Oscar?
This version has been named Oscar, after the jazz musician Oscar Peterson.
Oscar Peterson was a Canadian jazz pianist and composer. He was called the “Maharaja of the keyboard” by Duke Ellington, “O.P.” by his friends.[1][2] He released over 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, and received other numerous awards and honours over the course of his career. He is considered to have been one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, having played thousands of live concerts to audiences worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years.
So what are the biggest new User Features?
From the official WordPress release here’s the short list:
The new Default Theme: Twenty Thirteen
The new theme Twenty Thirteen was inspired by modern art and puts focus on the content with a simple, single-column design made for media-rich posting (think easier images and videos etc). It is aimed at giving publishers a much more user friendly yet attractive means by which to post their content on a routine basis. The theme is WAY colorful and includes some cool customization options that make it possible to designate how articles and other entries will appear on any given webpage.
New Auto-Save Feature
The newly enhanced auto-save feature is something that many WordPress users (including us) have been looking forward to for ages. In cases where your Internet connection is temporarily lost or when a site crashes, we are often forced to repeat entries that were not automatically saved from the point in which they were manually safeguarded. With the new auto-save function that has been revamped, content will automatically store much more frequently; plus there is the ability to browse previous revision versions. This can save a huge amount of time and also give contributors a way to compare different versions to identify exactly where a particular correction or edit was made. This feature can also prove very helpful for website administrators who are seeking to identify writing styles or faulty HTML code.
New Menu Editor
The new Menu Editor is much easier to understand and use. The whole Appearances > Menus system has been re-designed. Organization was the focus of this update, which you can see through the separation of the “Theme Locations” tab, and the collapsing of the menu item selection area.
An Improved Revision UI
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.The post revisions UI has been greatly improved to allow for better visualization and comparison. The revisions interface now features a slider that allows you to quickly scroll through your post revision history. The revision is previewed with edited snippets from your post, and then compared to previous versions so that you can see exactly what changed with each save.
Post Locking
Post Locking is another new feature in the 3.6 version that has a lot of admins rejoicing, as it grants the ability to take over editing of a specific posts in cases where an immediate correction needs to be made or an author has simply abandoned the project for a long period of time.
Native Media Support
In the past, the only way to embed video or audio in a post was to use third party plugins and websites. Now when you upload a video file into the media gallery, you have to option to embed the video right onto your page using a native video player. The same goes from audio files as well.
This all made doable by the built in HTML5 Media Player. Eliminating the extra step of YouTube or Vimeo (as most of us used) while also enabling websites to generate their home-grown multimedia entries is especially important for instructional videos, promotional efforts and other times in which it is much more appropriate to simply upload content rather than embed it from another website.
Should we push that “Upgrade Now” button?
If you are one of our Army of Flying Monkeys clients and users and were wondering whether or not you should upgrade now or wait, then we scream a monkey like “just go for it!”
We have tested the latest version of WP with all the Elegant and Genesis Themes after the 3.6 launch so that stress can be taken from your mind in the themes department.
And through the 15 upgrades we have done so far this week, all have worked flawlessly. and have not experienced any issues.
As always, before Updating WordPress, be sure to backup your website before continuing with the installation. That way if it does hiccup you can just restore it back again immediately…
