To mark a better New Year for all those who are using WordPress.org as well as for WordPress developer, WordPress.org Tuesday announced WordPress next instalment, the WordPress 3.5, dubbed “Elvin” in honor of drummer Elvin Jones, who played with John Coltrane. The new version features “completely re-imagined flow” for uploading photos as well as creating galleries.
Elvin even adds a new mobile-first default theme, name Twenty Twelve, refreshing styles for the dashboard, and updates everything to be Retina-ready with higher-resolution graphic. It even contains a new color picker and streamlining for fewer-used sections for the admin console. You can download the new release now from WordPress.org/Download.
What’s New
Dashboard
- Switch to prompt text in QuickPress to accommodate longer translated input labels
- Button styles updated throughout Dashboard to more modern, rectangular shape
- Help Text improvements throughout
Posts
- Rename the “HTML” editor tab to “Text”
- Prevent child categories from being visually promoted to the top level after Quick Edit
Media
- Add oEmbed suport for SoundCloud.com, SlideShare.net, and Instagram.com
- New Media Manager: Insert multiple galleries per post and independently order images
Accessibility
- Add visible focus within admin screens for better accessibility.
- Add “Skip to content” link to all screens in the admin.
- Add “Skip to toolbar” accessibility shortcut in the admin.
- Add ability to log out of user account without mouse input.
- Add “tab out” of the plugins and themes editors textareas.
Links
- Link Manager is hidden for new installs and for any existing installs that have no links (all sites with existing links are left as is). This can be restored with Link Manager Plugin
- Display links in widget if no link categories
Appearance
- Widgets menu is hidden if your theme hasn’t defined any sidebars
- Improve display of available custom headers with jQuery Masonry
Plugins
- Plugins favorited on WordPress.org can be viewed per user and directly installed from within the Dashboard. (Marking plugins as favorite on WordPress.Org)
Users
- Display name defaults to first name and last name for new users
- Force the user to explicitly choose between content deletion and reassignment when deleting users
Settings
- Remove Settings Privacy Screen and relocate Search Engine Visibility option to Settings Reading Screen
- Remove oEmbed options from the Settings Media Screen. Width adheres to theme’s content width, height is 1.5 times width
- Enable XML-RPC by default, remove Writing Settings option
- Remove AtomPub from core, can be re-enabled with a plugin
- Hide charset option in Settings Reading Screen in new installs, default to UTF-8
Multisite
- Multisite installs now work with WordPress in a subdirectory
- Turn off ms-files.php by default
- File quotas disabled by default on new installs
