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WordPress 3.6 Beta – what is new

WordPress 3.5 download counter shows more than 16 million downloads and WordPress 3.6 is in Beta, available for testing as we type.

Releases are coming faster and faster. Today’s post will show you what news does the version of the most popular CMS on the work bring.

This release is focused on content editing like revisions, autosave, post statuses, menus etc.

Twenty Thirteen Theme

One of the greatest new features is definitely the new bundled theme – Twenty Thirteen. It brings support for Post formats which are now improved.

Twenty Thirteen

The new theme is much more colorful than any before and it just looks great. You can see the Twenty Thirteen demo online . Every post has different background on archive pages and home page, which looks quite interesting.

The bold colors encourage authors to try out all the different formats. This color extends the full width of the window, which breaks your blog up into a lush, segmented timeline. This effect is even more pronounced on mobile browsers, where the screen can be dominated by one or two posts at a time, in all of their chromatic fullness.

Post formats

Post formats are really great, but admin UI for this feature has always had some usability issues. But not any more. UI is now intuitive and just looking great:

Wordpress 3.6 post formats

Users are able to select and switch between post formats, and the edit area is changing according to the post format selected.

With Twenty Thirteen theme supporting post formats, there is no more excuses for developers and not using them.

Menus

Menus UI in WordPress 3.6 went through some serious changes and look and work better than ever before.

Menu tabs are gone and will not confuse people any more:

Wordpress New menus

This looks really great and is quite easier for newcomers to understand.

As you can see from above image, accordion is added to make menu meta boxes work even better.

Post revisions

Revisions are an extremely powerful tool for content tracking in WordPress. For 3.6 they’re improved with more meaning to the average  user by presenting more information about changes visually.

Post revisions

Compare revisions is even more powerful:

Revisions---compare

Autosave

Autosave feature is improved and is now saving locally which will prevent loss of user data between saving post revisions to the database.

Login expiration warnings are also added which will prevent loss of data due to cookie expiration.

Post locking

Post locking mechanism is improved and you can now ask the user which has locked the content for a new lock directly through edit post interface.

Post locking

Quite handy, you can also ditch the lock if the user is not around for a long period of time.

Other changes and fixes

There are even more stuff in the new version like:

  • better HTML5 tagging of forms all around
  • Improved comment markup in wp_list_comments
  • Bunch of external libraries updates
  • Better log in messages, redirects after logging in …

What didn’t make it to WordPress 3.6

Unfortunately Edit Flow plugin and the whole new editorial workflow did not make it into 3.6 along with new custom post statuses. It just wasn’t enough time. You can read why on this explanation.

All in all, another great release is upon us and WordPress is getting better and better through time.

Don’t forget that you can always submit your ideas to WordPress .

What feature do you like the most in WordPress 3.6? Let me know below in comments!

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