WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” has been released and brings a number of improvements to the popular CMS. Like all WordPress releases, this one too is named after a Jazz musician, a jazz drummer, Elvin Jones.
For end users, one of the immediately visible changes is the overhauled media manager, which now has a much better flow for working with images. Galleries now support drag-drop reordering, and captions can be edited inline; additionally it is also possible to insert multiple photos as once.
The admin section has received a number of enhancements including a new welcome screen, a new colour picker, and polish to some lesser used areas. The backend has also been refreshed with support for the HiDPI displays with higher quality assets.
WordPress 3.5 comes with a new theme “Twenty Twelve” featuring a cleaner design that is built with a mobile-first approach and using responsive design principles.
There are a number of new features for developers building on WordPress as well.
The comment and user query classes have been enhanced with support for meta attributes. WordPress supports adding custom fields (metadata) to users and comments in addition to posts. If you have defined custom meta attributes for users or comments they can now be be used via WP_Comment_Query and WP_User_Query.
The multi-site function switch_to_blog() has been received performance improvements.
For front-end development, WordPress now includes the Backbone and Underscore libraries. This means theme and plug-in developers can rely on these libraries being installed. Also the TinyMCE, jQuery, jQuery UI, and SimplePie libraries have been updated to the latest version.
The XML-RPC interface to WordPress now supports user queries, post revisions, and searching.
There are a number of other additions and improvements to WordPress 3.5 that you can read about here. You can also check out the following video which shows some of these features in action:
