WordPress developers are hard at work on Beta 3.6. I downloaded it recently and played around with it. In a nutshell, WordPress has become Tumblr. It’s gone “back to blogging” — its origins. Anyone with a Tumblr account will recognize the standard tumblog post types, and they’re all there: Text, Chat, Quote, Video, Audio, Image, Gallery, Link, and Aside.

Custom Post Types

Beautiful Typography

Big Fat Footer Widgets

While this is a bit annoying for all those businesses who created their sites with WordPress, it doesn’t mean WordPress cannot still drive a business site.

Here are some of the highlights of the beta release:

1. New Default Theme — Twenty Thirteen is the new default theme and it’s very elegant.
2. Back to Blogging — Twenty Thirteen has got great typography elements and the focus is, indeed, on content. Each post type sports a different background panel color and icon set.
3. Revamped Widget Areas — The primary widget area is now in the huge footer, although you can also have a traditional sidebar widget area as well.
4. Audio/Video Enhancements — Added functions to generate metadata for audio/video and oEmbed support for Rdio and Spotify.
5. Comments – Improved wp_list_comments() markup; added HTML 5 input types in the comment form
6. Appearance — Spiffy new user interface and the customizaer can be accessed via the Appearance menu.
7. Plugins — WP now prevents plugins from overriding jQuery in the admin.
8. Users — Removed the three default contact methods (AIM, YIM, Jabber) for new installs; the process for deleting users has been improved.
9. Settings — WordPress now allows any post format to be set as default in Writing settings.
10. Accessibility — There is now better keyboard/screen reader accessibility in the Nav Menus user interface. In particular, the “select a file” link works much better with keyboard navigation.

Would you like your next web site to be built on WordPress? Then you should consider hiring a design team that lives and breathes WordPress and has been since 2004, and who keeps abreast of all the cutting edge features it has to offer. A Pixelita Design is more affordable than you think!

Joni

Joni Mueller has been designing web sites for hire since 2003, when she first blew up her web host’s server by insisting on running Greymatter. Since then, Joni has designed for Blogger and Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress and CMS Made Simple. She lives with her cat and shoe collection in a bucolic old section of Houston called Idylwood. For some strange reason, Joni likes to refer to herself in the third person. When she’s not working on web design, she’s ordering lawyers around. And blogging about it. Or both.

www.jonimueller.com