WordPress 3.5 Beta 1 has been released and available for download! The final version of WordPress 3.5 is expected to release in 5th December 2012 with a new twenty twelve theme. If you don’t want to wait till December 2012, you can grab it now at the WordPress themes directory.
Beta release is an indication that product is ready for RC launch. It is released before Release candidate & Final Launch and users are recommended not to use this version on a production site.
The biggest thing that WordPress team is working on is overhauling the media experience from the ground up.
What’s New:
- Appearance: A simplified welcome screen. A new color picker. And the all-HiDPI (retina) dashboard.
- Accessibility: Keyboard navigation and screen reader support have both been improved.
- Plugins: You can browse and install plugins you’ve marked as favorites on WordPress.org, directly from your dashboard.
- Mobile: It’ll be easier to link up your WordPress install with the mobile apps, as XML-RPC is now enabled by default.
- Links: The link manager will be hidden for new installations.
What’s New for Developers:
- External libraries updated: TinyMCE 3.5.6. SimplePie 1.3. jQuery 1.8.2. jQuery UI 1.9 (and it’s not even released yet). The WordPress 3.5 also added Backbone 0.9.2 and Underscore 1.3.3, and you can use protocol-relative links when enqueueing scripts and styles.
- WP Query: You can now ask to receive posts in the order specified by
post__in. - XML-RPC: New user management, profile editing, and post revision methods.
- Multisite: switch_to_blog() is now used in more places, is faster, and more reliable. Also: You can now use multisite in a subdirectory, and uploaded files no longer go through ms-files (for new installs).
- TinyMCE: Added API support for “views” which you can use to offer previews and interaction of elements from the visual editor.
- Posts API: Major performance improvements when working with hierarchies of pages and post ancestors. Also, you can now “turn on” native custom columns for taxonomies on edit post screens.
- Comments API: Search for comments of a particular status, or with a meta query (same as with WP_Query).
- oEmbed: Added support for a few oEmbed providers.
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