One of the key changes to WP 3.5 is the awesome new Media Manager. When you’re inserting images into your Posts or Pages now, you’ll get a much more streamlined experience, whether you’re inserting a single image, a whole gallery or setting a featured image. When you’re inserting a gallery of images, you can now also “drag ‘n drop” to reorder them. And of course, the guide has been updated to reflect the new screens that you’ll encounter using this sweet new Media Manager.

There are also some exciting new WordPress Embeds. You can now natively embed SoundCloud, Slideshare and Instagram links. Just like the other WordPress embeds, you simply insert the URL into your page and WordPress will automatically format them and make them all pretty for you.

WordPress 3.5 also ships with a new default theme, Twenty Twelve. Twenty Twelve is a mobile-first fully responsive theme that looks great on any device. It includes a brand new front page template complete with its own widgets, an optional display font, styling for post formats, and an optional full-width page template.

The entire User Interface has also been freshened up. Out with the old fashioned curved buttons and in with the oh-so-sexy, retina enabled buttons. Shiny!

For all you developers out there, WordPress 3.5 includes an update of the core external libraries. Also, WordPress now includes the Underscore and Backbone JavaScript libraries. TinyMCE, jQuery, jQuery UI, and SimplePie have also been updated to the latest versions.

I hope you find this updated manual useful and as usual, you can download the PDF or (brandable) Word document versions or read it online. The ePub & Mobipocket versions in the Apple iBookstore, B&N Nook Books Store and the Amazon Kindle store have also been updated, but it may take a few days for those to appear. I’ll update the links to the new versions as they become available.

For those people that aren’t planning to update to WP 3.5 just yet, you can still download the previous versions of the Easy WP Guide WordPress Manual or read them online using the links in the right-hand column.

One of the key changes to WP 3.5 is the sweet new Media Manager. When you’re inserting images into your Posts or Pages now, you’ll get a much more streamlined experience, whether you’re inserting a single image, a whole gallery or setting a featured image. Selected images are more clearly identified, along with a better overall workflow from uploading to inserting. When inserting a gallery of images, you can now also “drag ‘n drop” to reorder them.

WordPress Embeds have some exciting new additions. You can now natively embed SoundCloud, Slideshare and Instagram links, simply by inserting the URL into your page. As with the other WordPress embeds, these links will be formatted all pretty like.

WordPress 3.5 also ships with a new default theme, Twenty Twelve. Twenty Twelve is a mobile-first fully responsive theme that looks great on any device. It includes a brand new front page template complete with its own widgets, an optional display font, styling for post formats, and an optional full-width page template.

The overall User Interface has also been tweaked. Gone are the old fashioned curved buttons. They’ve now been replaced with oh-so-sexy, retina enabled buttons. Shiny!

There’s also lots of other little UI tweaks here and there as well, so keep an eye out for them as you checkout all the new features.

The core external libraries have also been updated. WordPress now includes the Underscore and Backbone JavaScript libraries and TinyMCE, jQuery, jQuery UI, and SimplePie have all been updated to the latest versions.

Last, but definitely not least, is the Easy WP Guide WordPress manual. It’s not quite ready to release just yet, but a brand new version is currently being worked on and will be available to download very shortly.

In the meantime, go and checkout the WordPress blog for more information on WordPress 3.5, Download the update or click that Update button in your Dashboard (but remember, don’t forget to make a backup first).

Big thanks to everyone who has downloaded the guide or shared links with your friends, clients or fellow WordPressers.

WordPress 3.5 is due out early December, so keep an eye out for an all new, updated Easy WP Guide. As usual, you’ll be able to download the PDF or (brandable) Word document versions or read it online.

Thanks everyone!

Although there weren’t a huge number of (front end) changes for this new version of WordPress, I’ve still updated several sections of the guide. The majority of changes were under the hood, removing bugs and providing optimisations to make WordPress even faster and more stable.

On the Dashboard side of things, the big change this time around was the new live theme previews and customising. There were also some changes made to the custom headers functionality, although this requires theme support so, depending on the theme you’re using, you may not see this feature in your dashboard.

Another significant change is the ability to include basic HTML in your image captions. This also means that caption field has now been increased in size from a single line to a multiline text field. It’s now also possible to embed Tweets into your pages in much the same way you can embed YouTube videos. WordPress will even format it so it’s nice and pretty for you! Smaller changes included the renaming of the ‘Admin Bar’ to ‘Toolbar’ on several screens and a small enhancement to the image editing functionality in the Media Library. Numerous screen images have also been updated, where appropriate.

I have also changed the font used within the PDF version of the guide which removes the issues of the slighty ‘jaggy’ text that occurred on past PDF’s. So, download the latest copy and you should find it much easier on the eyes.

For all you developers out there, the changes made under the hood for WordPress 3.4 include Post query optimisations to avoid table scans and the number of strings loaded on the front end was greatly reduced, resulting in faster front page load times for localised installations. Also, better support for East Asian languages, right-to-left languages, theme translations, and more. Optimisations were also made to the Themes & Custom Header and Background API’s along with a new XML-RPC WordPress API that supports custom content types and taxonomies, as well as dozens of other bug fixes and improvements. jQuery, jQuery UI, TinyMCE, Plupload, PHPMailer, SimplePie, and other libraries were updated and jQuery UI Touch Punch was introduced.

I hope you find this updated manual useful and as usual, you can download the PDF or (brandable) Word document versions or read it online. The ePub & Mobipocket versions in the Apple iBookstore, B&N Nook Books Store and the Amazon Kindle store have also been updated, but it may take a few days for those to appear.

For those people that aren’t planning to update to WP 3.4 just yet, you can still download the previous versions of the Easy WP Guide WordPress Manual or read them online using the links in the right-hand column.

If you’ve never been to a WordCamp, or even if you have, you should definitely try to make your way to WordCamp Sydney. WordCamps are a great way to meet and catchup with other WordPress users and enthusiasts. WordCamps aren’t just for developers, they’re for anyone who uses or is even thinking about using WordPress.

WordCamp Sydney will be having two tracks. There will be a “High Tech” track which is more suited to developers & designers and also a “Low Tech” track that’s suitable for end users or those setting up a new blog. Having the two tracks means there’s something for everyone and if you’re still not convinced, go check out the sessions that have been listed so far. There’ll be more listed as more and more speakers are confirmed.

Oh, I’ll be speaking as well, so even more reason to go, right!? I’ll be doing a talk on Getting to grips with Firebug. So, if you you’re just starting to tinker with some code or just want to make a few simple theme changes, come along and I can tell you how to use a great browser add-on called Firebug that will make the job super simple! Easy WP Guide is also a Community Sponsor for the event.

So, what are you waiting for! Go and book your ticket. Go on, I’ll wait…