Upcoming Features of WordPress 3.6

A software however good has to improve continuously or will be outdated very soon in this time of fast technological change. WordPress is highly popular and a strong community around it also is enhanced continuously to make it more and more useful to its users. WordPress generally makes a new release every three to four months.

Generally the ideas for the for the new features are collected from different places like the ideas forum, the support forum , the most popular plugins , some dev brainstorms and other sources. Then with discussions the features of the release are frozen and tasks are created for them.

Now the WordPress team is working hard on developing the features for the new release which is WordPress 3.6. WordPress 3.6 has many cool new features like enhancements in Post Format, a great new theme twentythirteen etc. In this article we are going to do an overview of all these features and what can we expect from WordPress 3.6.

Post Format

Post formats have been in WordPress for quite some time now. In WordPress 3.5 you could select a poster format as shown below.

Even though post formats are present in WordPress since some time they did not have the best UI it deserved. In WordPress 3.6 the admin UI of post formats has gone a drastic change. With WordPress 3.6 the post format is going to be right on top of your editor. The UI of post formats is somewhat inspired by this plugin.

Now based on the post format you select there will be appropriate fields which will be displayed. For example if we select the post format as an image then we can see the image upload select option just below the title as shown below.

Similarly if we click in the link post format we will see a new field for the link url as shown below.

Improvements in WordPress Auto saving

There are some major improvements in the Auto saving of the posts in WordPress 3.6. One of the major things which WordPress wanted to solve for the user is loss of data during the editing of the post. A lot of things can go wrong while editing a post and hence the auto save feature now saves the post automatically in every 15 seconds. This would help you not to loose data in case there is there is a browser crash or an OS crash or your baby walks over your  laptop.

Also if you are editing a post and keep your session idle for long so that the cookie of your browser expires. In that case when you start editing again WordPress will prompt you to give your login credentials right there as shown below. After providing your credentials you can easily continue editing exactly from where you left.

Post locking

WordPress has always had great support for multiple author blogs. In WordPress 3.6 there are features of post locking which helps multiple users to work on the save post without overwriting each others work.In case one user is editing a particular post then and another user sees the list of the post he will be able to see who is editing any particular post at that point of time as shown below.

In case the second user still clicks on edit he will be prompted by the below message where he can go back from editing or take over the editing.

If the user takes over the editing the first user who was editing the post will get the following prompt notifying that the other user has taken over.

These features will be a great help for multiple author blogs.

The great new theme

With WordPress 3.6 there is a completely new default theme bundled with WordPress. As the naming convention of the default themes for WordPress go this theme is called as twentythirteen. The older themes twentyeleven and twentytwelve are also bundled with WordPress 3.6 in case you want to use them you will have to just activate them from the WordPress admin.

The theme twentythirteen has a very bold look and has a responsive s layout. It can be easily viewed on devices of different sizes. As there are a lot of Smartphones and tablets being used to view website twentythirteen layout becomes one of its major plus points. Also twentythirteen has laid high importance on readability and hence it has a very different font from the other default WordPress themes in the past.

It basically has a widgetised area in the footer where you can drop your widgets as needed.It has a single column layout but provides  a widgetised sidebar on which you can add anything you like.