WordPress is now powering over 60 Million Websites. It’s a clear choice for many businesses, and in particular, Brown Bag clients. With some modifications and a few talented developers and designers there really is no limit to what WordPress can do.
With their latest 3.6 release “Oscar“, there have been several improvements made to the back-end to make management and maintenance even easier. Here’s the skinny:
User Updates
Revisions system – The per page and per post revisions system has been completely revamped, WordPress now saves every revision you make and allows for a visual representation of previous versions of your posts / pages, which is great for the non tech user needing to roll back to a previous version of a page. In previous versions the saved changes were shown in code view, which is really no help to the average user so this upgrade is a great improvement.
Video and Audio native Integration – no need for 3rd party services to host your rich media files as WordPress now includes a built in HTML 5 media player allowing for simple integration of your video and audio files.
Autosave updates – The improvements that have been made here are great, in previous versions of wordpress if you had multiple authors working on a post at the same time there was the chance of someone loosing their work due to the autosave features of WordPress. This issue has now been corrected by having WordPress create unique autosave streams that save locally as well as on the server, making it the system much more reliable. There is also a new feature that not only shows you when someone else is editing a post but allows you to take over editing of that post.
Developer Features
New Audio / Video API – The latest API now gives you access to metadata like ID3 Tags, ID3 Tags allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself.
HTML5 expansion – WordPress is now allowing themes to choose improved HTML 5 markup for search forms, comment forms and comment lists, allowing for better compatibility and search ability across all devices as well as less development time utilizing the new input types:
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Updating Shortcodes – WordPress has now added the ability to search content for shortcodes with “has_shortcode() and make edits to the attributes. This update will definitely save developers a good bit of time as shortcodes are becoming a more and more popular way of integrating custom content into existing pages / themes.