WordPress 3.5 has just been released and there's some exciting new updates kids! WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” is named in honor of drummer Elvin Jones, who played with John Coltrane, among others.
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).
