WordPress 3.6- What to Expect

WordPress 3.6- What to Expect

WordPress has been the most preferred blogging platform for a while now. Over the years, it has also emerged as a preferred content management system for websites and not just blogs.

The last version — WordPress 3.5 — brought a new media experience and improvements across the dashboard and crossed over 6 million downloads! However all that is old news. What can we expect from newest version of WordPress?

Preview to WordPress 3.6

WordPress 3.6 is set for a release sometime in April 2013, with a lot of debate over what can be expected by way of features that improve the publishing workflow. There are strong signs that the release is going to be focused on content editing, revisions, auto-save, workflow and editing modes to enhance potential for the users and make life easier with the dashboard features.

In the past, WordPress had great themes that helped in presenting the content in an appealing manner. However, the admin for the feature always seemed to have usability issues and has kept developers reinventing and tweaking for projects.

In WordPress 3.6, the UI is expected to be revised to help users understand the post format. One of the other options is likely to be the provision of standard themes that are portable for data availability and display. Besides the above changes, below are a few more features that WordPress 3.6 promises

Expected WordPress 3.6 Features

WordPress 3.6 Feature 1: Auto-save and Post Locking

Since auto save is important to a writer’s workflow, the lack of implementation forces many to switch to external editors. This keeps them from writing directly into the WordPress admin. This alone will help with expired cookies, loss of connection, core errors browser crashes, etc., when writing in WordPress. A WP Heartbeat API will send requests to the server every 15 seconds and trigger events on receiving data. This is aimed at auto-save and post locking. Post locking will prevent conflicts and loss of data resulting from editing of a post and auto-save will prevent loss of data between saving post revisions to the database.

WordPress 3.6 Feature 2: Editorial Flow and Revisions

Multi-author sites and blogs will be improved with the Edit Flow plug-in planned in WordPress 3.6.

WordPress 3.6 Feature 3: Menus

With UI refinements, the menu management is likely to show the difference between adding items to a menu and adding the menu itself to a theme. There will be a meta-box with a home and log in as the default links, this has in the past shown problems while add these links.  

WordPress 3.6 Feature 4: Distraction Free Writing

This feature has received both positive and negative attention in the past, because of lack of formatting support. WordPress does not support markdown, and the DFW editor relies on keyboard shortcuts. As of now, the talk for improvement will be in the areas of supporting, formatting and behavior during writing.

WordPress 3.6 Feature 5: Code Maintenance and Architecture

As with any other version, there will be some updates in WordPress 3.6 because of caching and performance. But the two main things that are likely to change are:

• The mysql_ functions are deprecated in PHP so WordPress 3.6 starts moving towards support of PDO extension for serving database connections. For developers, it primarily means that if for any reason you’re not using the native wpdb class to operate with a database in your plugin, you’d better start right now — apart from benefiting from its robust feature list you’ll also avoid incompatibility with future PHP versions.
• UNIQUE constraints will be removed for the slug in wp_terms. This small detail is to prepare for future improvements of the taxonomy API, in particular how it handles shared terms.

Get ready for WordPress 3.6

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