WordPress 3.5 Beta 1 [1] has been released! The final version of WordPress 3.5 is expected to ship on 5th December 2012.
WordPress 3.5 will ship with a new default theme, named Twenty Twelve. But if you do not want to wait till December 2012, you can grab it now [2] at the WordPress Theme directory. It will work with WordPress 3.4.x as well
What’s New (General)
- Appearance: A simplified welcome screen. A new color picker. And the all-HiDPI (retina) dashboard.
- Accessibility: Keyboard navigation and screen reader support have both been improved.
- Plugins: You can browse and install plugins you’ve marked as favorites on WordPress.org, directly from your dashboard.
- Mobile: It’ll be easier to link up your WordPress install with our mobile apps [3], as XML-RPC is now enabled by default.
- Links: We’ve hidden the Link Manager for new installs. (Don’t worry, there’s a plugin for that [4].)
What’s New (For Developers)
- External libraries updated: TinyMCE 3.5.6. SimplePie 1.3. jQuery 1.8.2. jQuery UI 1.9 (and it’s not even released yet). We’ve also added Backbone 0.9.2 and Underscore 1.3.3, and you can use protocol-relative links when enqueueing scripts and styles. (#16560 [5])
- WP Query: You can now ask to receive posts in the order specified by
post__in. (#13729 [6]) - XML-RPC: New user management, profile editing, and post revision methods. We’ve also removed AtomPub. (#18428 [7], #21397 [8], #21866 [9])
- Multisite: switch_to_blog() is now used in more places, is faster, and more reliable. Also: You can now use multisite in a subdirectory, and uploaded files no longer go through ms-files (for new installs). (#21434 [10], #19796 [11], #19235 [12])
- TinyMCE: We’ve added API support for ‘views’; which you can use to offer previews and interaction of elements from the visual editor. (#21812 [13])
- Posts API: Major performance improvements when working with hierarchies of pages and post ancestors. Also, you can now ‘turn on’; native custom columns for taxonomies on edit post screens. (#11399 [14], #21309 [15], #21240 [16])
- Comments API: Search for comments of a particular status, or with a meta query (same as with WP_Query). (#21101 [17], #21003 [18])
- oEmbed: We’ve added support for a few oEmbed providers, and we now handle SSL links. (#15734 [19], #21635 [20], #16996 [21], #20102 [22])
Download: WordPress 3.5 Beta 1 [23]