I thought I’d post a little tidbit for all you fellow WordPress nerds and fanboys and fangirls. WordPress 3.3.1 just came out a couple of days ago but the development team is already hard at work planning the next release cycle. Read below to see a very early peek at what may be coming in the next version.
The notes from the latest Dev Chat gave a small glimpse of what the overall goal for 3.4 will be and some of the features that MIGHT be planned.
Overall Goal:
We agreed that 3.4′s “theme” would be, “Making it easier to make your site look how you want it to look.”
Shorthand: Appearance/switching themes. The idea is that a combination of front-end features, dashboard features, and under-the-hood improvements all tied to managing your site’s appearance will be the focus of 3.4.
These kinds of features are currently being accomplished by plugins and some theme frameworks, but having these improvements in Core is a no-brainer and welcome in my book.
It will also include smaller things that don’t live in the appearance section but are related to the overarching goal, such as making it possible to have links in image captions.
You would think that links in image captions would have been in WordPress several releases ago…I’m glad it’s finally getting the attention it deserves.
High-level:
the features would likely include: a theme-setup wizard that would incorporate an option for configuring all the appearance-related stuff before activating a new theme (speaking of, Twenty Twelve is targeted for 3.4), and then specific improvements around menus, widgets, backgrounds, headers, easier static front page process, multisite appearance management, etc.
I think being able to configure a new theme before activation will be a HUGE help. I regularly change themes on both my own and my client sites and having the ability to set it up exactly how it should appear before activation will be a real time saver and take the “development server” out of the picture for me on many projects.
