WordPress 3.6 “Oscar” Released

The official WordPress Blog announced yesterday that the long awaited release of WordPress 3.6 has finally come to fruition so website owners can finally upgrade. So what’s new in WordPress 3.6? Let’s take a look…

The WordPress elves have been very hard at work to bring some really great new features. I’ve personally upgraded RefuGeeks and also my other sites to WordPress 3.6 and I’ve had no problems. I was a little bummed to see that the back-end admin theme MP6 didn’t make it to default in this release. But hey, that’s easily installed and enabled.

Some of the new featured for WordPress 3.6 include the following (list taken from the original blog post):

• The new Twenty Thirteen theme inspired by modern art puts focus on your content with a colourful, single-column design made for media-rich blogging.
• Revamped Revisions save every change and the new interface allows you to scroll easily through changes to see line-by-line who changed what and when.
• Post Locking and Augmented Autosave will especially be a boon to sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Each author now has their own autosave stream, which stores things locally as well as on the server (so much harder to lose something) and there's an interface for taking over editing of a post, as demonstrated beautifully by our bearded buddies in the video above.
• Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds with no reliance on external services.
• The Menu Editor is now much easier to understand and use.

The new WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme

There have also been a lot of improvements under the hood in WordPress 3.6, but I won’t bore you with all that techie information, if you’re that way inclined then hit the link above and have a good old read of the announcement blog post. For those of you who want to see some of the new features of WordPress 3.6 in action, here is a video showing off some pretty admirable acting skills from within the WordPress team. :-)

Obviously upgrading to the latest version of any software always means that you have the latest security patches installed. So please ensure that you upgrade when you get the chance. WordPress seems to be getting better and better with age, so I wonder what the next version of WordPress has in store for us? I suppose only time will tell…