With WordPress 3.4 beta approaching in the coming couple of weeks, let’s take a look at what new features to expect and eventually be delighted by at the end of the 3.4 development cycle, which would be around mid-April. Excited?
Theme Customizer
One of the most feverishly-developed featured at the moment is the Theme Customizer. This WordPress 3.4 feature is set to provide a new way to browse themes. By providing an easy-to-use, real-time tool to effortlessly apply Header images, Background colors and patterns, Menus, the Title and Tagline and other customizable theme features, the Theme Customizer aims to save trips to the different Appearance areas and improve usability on the whole.
Multi-site improvements
WordPress 3.4 will be able to support a Multi-site environment even if installed in a subdirectory. Multi-site WordPress is aiming to get auto-complete when searching for users and sites. Searching for users on a particular site should be possible, as well as other minor usability improvements.
HTML support in captions
One of the most requested features that many are waiting for is the ability to add HTML to image captions, including links and formatting.
More XML-RPC
XML-RPC is what makes it possible for such applications as Android for WordPress to work with your site. This protocol allows for third-party apps to post content, manage comments, etc. without having to login into the WordPress dashboard. New methods allow for management of custom post types, taxonomies, and user blogs on Multi-site. This change will probably reflect itself in additional functionality in your favorite Weblog clients.
Better international support
Several important localization and internationalization features are going to make it into WordPress 3.4, including better word count for languages with one glyph per word, the possibility to translate theme and plugin headers, better RTL support.
Add Comments in Edit Post
You’ll be able to further manage comments directly from the Edit Post view, by being able to add new comments, too.
Other improvements
- Dozens of bug fixes
- Improved speed along with lower memory consumption rates
- Indefinite scrolling of Themes search screen
- A brand new Theme API, which wraps all the theme functions
- Clicking admin bar scrolls to top (super useful trick)
- Links widget shall be able to sort and filter links
What you’re not going to see
Twenty Twelve
The much-anticipated Twenty Twelve theme will not make it into WordPress 3.4, even though development has started and is ongoing. Twenty Twelve will most likely be shipped with WordPress 3.5 which should be available by the end of October.
Development has temporarily moved to Github.
Favicon upload support
Another long-awaited feature – favicon management right out of the box. There’s slim chance this feature will make it into WordPress 3.4, hopefully we’ll get to see it in 3.5 instead.
Staying informed
For those who are eagerly awaiting WordPress 3.4, checking WordPress.org every day hoping to see some updates (“Are we there yet?”), keep an eye out for daily updates on:
So, which of the features are you most excited about? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below, or shoot a tweet our way. Don’t forget to subscribe, we’ll be one of the first ones to let you know when WordPress 3.4 is finally out.
Auto complete is going to save me so much time!
Also just so you know your link to the WordPress dev blog is broken for me (missing the http://).
Mike, thanks for your feedback. Link fixed ;)
Wow, this is the first major release in a long time that I could care less about. From your list above it gives the impression that the dev crew took the winter off, which of course isn’t the case.
To answer your question, nope, not excited in the least, nothing to see here that plugins haven’t been doing for some time now. BORING!
You just haven’t seen the customizer in action yet. :-)
As we continue to make our release cycles shorter (we aim for 4 months, and usually make it happen within 5) there will be less going into each release. And that’s the point — faster cycles with targeted featured and improvements are much better than dragging things out for little more than an extra “wow” factor.
Hey, Dave, thanks for stopping by. Were you excited about WordPress 3.3? It did have more fancy features on the outside, didn’t it?
It is very shameful if twenty twelve theme is released on october 2012, it already almost the end of 2012. It should be twenty thirteen. Thats very a long wait.
We plan for three releases per year. Not sure where October came from. I imagine 3.5 will be earlier than that.
It’ll be a bit longer than 12 months between themes, but not by much. We released Twenty Eleven in early July 2011, and Twenty Ten in late June 2010.
Andrew, there was discussion that 3.5 was going to be released after GSoC, which would end in September + 1 month for everything else. Since this year GSoC is losing out on the WordPress.org, I imagine 3.5 will be released earlier, sometime in August?
Improved speed along with lower memory consumption rates
WordPress can neat up heaps of resources and force you to upgrade your hosting plan costing more money
WordPress does the job very well with low memory and resources footprint.
If you have to upgrade your hosting, maybe some bad written plugin is the cause.
Brad, the core has definitely become more lightweight, some parts more than others, but overall you should get better performance. Third-party plugins and themes on the other hand, haven’t usually got the WordPress core team to work with, thus lacking the finesse and poetry that they contribute to the code. Profiling is a great way to find out where the bottleneck is, in 99.9% of the cases the theme or some plugins are to blame. And use caching. Thanks for stopping by ;)
“HTML support in captions”
I don’t understand that one…
because an Image is a “post”
Caption is the “excerpt”
Description is the “body”
There for we’ve always been able to add html to images anyway, at least in theory.
Hey Zane. Yes, it was theoretically possible (+ I believe there were some plugins that allowed that, not sure right now), and now this is going to be supported by core, including line feeds!
Unfortunately this http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10955#comment:24 didn’t make it into 3.4. Which btw. would be really super awesome!
Cor, yes, that feature is quite interesting. Something will eventually happen in that area, since ThickBox hasn’t been maintained since 2009, time will come when switching would be necessary.
We may also have custom login URL.
I love the theme customizer! I’ve seen this feature in some theme frameworks, it’s really great when WP integrate into the core.
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Is there anyway to see exactly what bugs are fixed in 3.4? I’m just curious, also looking forward to the theme customiser!
James, thanks for stopping by. Yes, there’s a list of all the fixed bugs in WordPress 3.4 in Trac.
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Despite the numerous negative comments I’m looking forward to the new release. Well done guys.
Ogólnie interesujący post :D, myślę, że inni czytelnicy również podzielą to zdanie ;) Fajnie od czasu do czasu przeczytać coś sensowanego – dodaje do czytnika RSS!
For the foreigners, the translations files for admin and front will be separated ! The performance of the sites will be greatly increased !
Super awesome features! The theme customizer & the new Theme API sounds exciting.
Hi Kovshenin,
There are some great improvements in 3.4. Theme customizer looks fantastic. Looking forward to it.
-Dev
What about a new default 2012 theme? Not on this version?
hehehe dobre dobre :)
There’s a funny “stuff” in the screen capture illustrating “HTML support in captions” (which will be my favorite feature in this release) ;-)
Wow, still no update to the default WordPress Media Gallery. This thing is in dire need of an update. You can’t even remove certain images from galleries without deleting them. Theme Customizer? That’s what you have been working on? WordPress is awesome and I’m very appreciative of all the hard work and that it’s free. However, I wish you guys would make improvements to the Media/Gallery portions of WordPress.
Matt
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I really need to update my WordPress theme and gallery. When does it officially come out?
Nice that WordPress team continues to develop this already great platform.
Most excited I am about upcoming improved XML-RPC support and of course HTML captions. Well they are not like huge thing but still makes life easier.