WordPress 3.5 Beta 1

WordPress 3.5 Beta 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 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, 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.)

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)
  • WP Query: You can now ask to receive posts in the order specified by post__in. (#13729)
  • XML-RPC: New user management, profile editing, and post revision methods. We’ve also removed AtomPub. (#18428, #21397, #21866)
  • 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, #19796, #19235)
  • TinyMCE: We’ve added API support for ‘views’; which you can use to offer previews and interaction of elements from the visual editor. (#21812)
  • 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, #21309, #21240)
  • Comments API: Search for comments of a particular status, or with a meta query (same as with WP_Query). (#21101, #21003)
  • oEmbed: We’ve added support for a few oEmbed providers, and we now handle SSL links. (#15734, #21635, #16996, #20102)

Download: WordPress 3.5 Beta 1

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WordPress 2.6.3

WordPress 2.6.3 is out, it fixes a Snoopy class vulnerability.

A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced today. WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard. Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, we wanted to get an update out immediately. 2.6.3 is available for download right now. If you don’t want to download the whole release to get the security fix, you can download the following two files and copy them over your 2.6.2 installation.

Replace these 2 files:

  1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
  2. wp-includes/version.php

Download full version:

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WordPress 2.9

WordPress 2.9 has been release.

Here are some of the highlights:

  1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
  2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
  3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
  4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
  5. We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
  6. There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.
  7. Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
  8. A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
  9. Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
  10. You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
  11. We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
  12. Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
  13. Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
  14. Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
  15. The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
  16. Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
  17. When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
  18. The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.
  19. Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
  20. Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query

Download: WordPress 2.9 (2.2MB)
Changelog: WordPress 2.9

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