WordPress 3.6 is Coming Soon
We’ve installed the beta and taken a test drive. The new functionality is listed below (in order of importance for our clients) with a brief explanation of how this may or may not affect you.
Everyone will need to upgrade to 3.6 when it arrives. We will let you know when that happens.
Here’s what’s new in 3.6:
-
You can now embed audio and video files into your posts without relying on a plugin or a third party media hosting service.
For those of you that use video on your website or in your blog/news posts, this might be a big deal! We still recommend using a YouTube channel for video because it saves a lot of headaches and bandwidth on your server, but for those of you who video blog, embedding a YouTube video in a ‘Video Post’ is as simple as pasting the URL to the video in a box (pictured right).
If you do want to upload a video you shot on your phone to your blog, this native support for video makes it a piece of cake.
Note: It’s not clear yet if there is support for embedding video into pages yet, but we will keep you posted.
-
Auto-save
Posts are now auto-saved locally. If your browser crashes, your computer dies, or the server goes offline as you’re saving, you won’t lose your post.
-
The all-new revisions UI (User Interface) features avatars, a slider that “scrubs” through history, and two-slider range comparisons.
This enhancement makes it much easier to see past revisions on the fly using the slider to ‘go back in time’.
-
Post Formats
Post Formats now have their own UI (User Interface), and theme authors have access to templating functions to access the structured data.
This isn’t immediately applicable to most business websites built on WordPress, but what this means is that all Posts are not created equal. Posts can be assigned a specific ‘format’ that allows a theme designer to handle them each differently. This does make it much easier for those of you who video blog, or podcast to create posts using the appropriate format which makes embedding much easier (See #1).
- aside – Typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update.
- gallery – A gallery of images. Post will likely contain a gallery shortcode and will have image attachments.
- link – A link to another site. Themes may wish to use the first <a href=””> tag in the post content as the external link for that post. An alternative approach could be if the post consists only of a URL, then that will be the URL and the title (post_title) will be the name attached to the anchor for it.
- image – A single image. The first <img /> tag in the post could be considered the image. Alternatively, if the post consists only of a URL, that will be the image URL and the title of the post (post_title) will be the title attribute for the image.
- quote – A quotation. Probably will contain a blockquote holding the quote content. Alternatively, the quote may be just the content, with the source/author being the title.
- status – A short status update, similar to a Twitter status update.
- video – A single video. The first <video /> tag or object/embed in the post content could be considered the video. Alternatively, if the post consists only of a URL, that will be the video URL. May also contain the video as an attachment to the post, if video support is enabled on the blog (like via a plugin).
- audio – An audio file. Could be used for Podcasting.
- chat – A chat transcript, like so:
John: foo Mary: bar John: foo 2
-
Post Locking
You can see when someone is currently editing a post, and kick them out of it if they fall asleep at the keyboard.
-
Nav Menus
Nav menus have been simplified with an accordion-based user interface, and a separate tab for bulk-assigning menus to locations.
-
This year’s default theme is called Twenty Thirteen. It is “an opinionated, color-rich, blog-centric theme that makes full use of the new Post Formats support“. Since most of you as our clients have custom themes, this isn’t relevant to you, but if you were interested in seeing it, take a peek at in beta (pictured right).
