WordPress Rolls Out Its Latest Stable Release: WordPress 3.7
Everyone’s favorite blogging platform, WordPress, has just been refreshed with an update. Early this week, WordPress 3.7 was released, code-named “Basie” after jazz pianist Count Basie. The WordPress team—over 200 contributors and developers—guarantees this as the latest stable release of WordPress. You’ll be glad to know that a total of 437 bugs have been squashed in this update. So what’s under the hood of WordPress 3.7?
Automatic Background Updates
With WordPress 3.7, updates will from now on silently proceed in the background automatically. That’s a remarkable improvement since now we’ll spend less time worrying about crucial maintenance and security updates and more time blogging about the things we need to write about. Of course, there’s an option to turn off background updates if you’re not sure about adapting too early. Rest assured though, that the WordPress team tests thousands of sites before rolling out each update.
Stronger Passwords
Many of us are still guilty of creating weak passwords or else too lazy to create strong ones. With this new update, the WordPress team improves the password strength meter so it recognizes those all-too-common (and potentially fatal) passwords—birthdays, names, obvious keyboard patterns, and even pop culture references. The password meter prods you to create a more secure password, should it find your choice a little too weak. (Check out this guide on how to create strong passwords) Until passwords are phased out for a better security system that’s 100% crack-proof, we’ve got no choice but to use a password in the meantime, so we might as well make them as strong as possible.
Improved Search
Search has also been revamped in this new WordPress update. Whereas before, WordPress listed search results according to date, now it’ll be according to importance and relevance. Search terms and full sentences in the post titles and post contents will now turn up in the results pages. In specific, this is the new priority for displaying search results according to Poststat.us:
- Full sentence matches in post titles.
- All search terms in post titles.
- Any search terms in post titles.
- Full sentence matches in post content.
Obviously, this will definitely help visitors navigate around your site as they get the closest match of whatever it is they are searching for. And sites with lots of content stand to benefit as more of their content gets the exposure it needs.
Improved Language Support
WordPress 3.7 improves localization by providing more comprehensive language files than ever before (additional language updates will follow via automatic background upgrades.) With this language support, WordPress will certainly become more user-friendly to non-English-speaking user all over the world.
Better Build Tools for Developers.
Of course, the WordPress update benefits developers just as much as the site users. WordPress 3.7 offers new build tools, and we’ll let WordPress core developer Daryl Koopersmith explain the details. Needless to say, another crucial update, WordPress 3.8