Today WordPress has released it’s next big version…Wordpress 3.5 is on the shelves and ready to be downloaded!

After the most popular version of WordPress 3.4, 3.5 has a lot to live up to and I’m sure all the work that has gone into further improvements to WordPress have paid off.

WordPress 3.4 was downloaded more than 28 million times, there used to be a download counter on WordPress.org. This counter has now been reset and is counting the amount of downloads for version 3.5, at the time of writing this has already reached 100,000+ downloads on the first day of release.

WordPress 3.5

What’s new with 3.5?

WordPress 3.5 has been named Elvin after the drummer Elvin Jones.

Here is a quick video that goes over some of the newest features you will find on 3.5.

New Media Library

One of the biggest changes to 3.5 is the new improved media library, this allows you to upload images and create galleries inside the WordPress CMS. You can change the order of the images in the gallery, add a caption, add an alt tag, crop the images, add alignment to your image and lots more.

Uploading your images to WordPress is as easy as drag n dropping your images into the media library.

Twenty Twelve WordPress Theme

The new version is deployed with a new improved default WordPress theme. This theme is an excellent example of how to code a WordPress theme correctly. It shows off some of the great unused features like custom backgrounds, custom headers, theme customiser page. This theme CSS is even responsive and was built with a mobile first design, making this a great theme to use as a base or a parent theme for any website.

WordPress Dashboard

There are some improvements to the dashboard, all the images have been upgraded to now be retina ready which makes the dashboard look much sharper.

There is a new color picker to make it easy for you to select a new color for the background of the theme.

Some of the less used features, have been removed from the admin area. One of these features is the links menu, this feature will allow you to create a list of links you can use to add a blogroll to the sidebar of your site. The reason why this feature isn’t used anymore is because WordPress allows you to create multiple menus and use a WordPress widget to add menus to the page, therefore we don’t need to use the links feature anymore. Links have not been totally removed but the link is gone on the dashboard menu. If you still use this feature and want this menu item back you can install this plugin to get the links back.

Link Manager Plugin

Favourite Plugins

This is a feature that was announced back in October by Japh Thomson on WpTuts where he explained how to create a plugin to show your favourite WordPress plugins in the dashboard.

On WordPress.org you can select which plugins are your favourite plugins. This is a great way to bookmark certain plugins so you can access these at a later date.

In the WordPress dashboard under the plugins menu there is a new link at the top of the page which will display your favourite plugins. Where you can install them directly from the dashboard. This is a great feature if you need to create new instances of a WordPress site and use the same plugins over and over again.

Multi Site Organisation Improvements

With the WordPress multisite feature you can host another WordPress site using the same instance of WordPress. You can setup user roles to have access to all sites on your WordPress instance.

When you use the multi site feature you can install the new site into a directory in the same location as the first site. The problem is this had to be at the root of your site, in the new version of WordPress you can select a sub-directory to install your mutli sites.

WordPress Developers

There are some new features that developers need to be made aware of.

Widgets Page

The widgets page will allow your users to add widgets into the sidebars of the theme, but if the theme doesn’t have any sidebars you can’t add any widgets. In the new version of WordPress the widget page will be hidden if there aren’t any sidebars registered on the theme.

General Fixes

Bump default memory limit from 32MB to 40MB

Add easier expression of time constants, for example DAY_IN_SECONDS vs 86400

Add flexible-header to allowed theme tags

Add ‘publish_post’ meta capability

Add ‘term_taxonomy_id’ field handling to WP_Tax_Query::transform_query(), resulting in fewer database queries

Add two hooks to Post Editing screen, ‘edit_form_after_title’ and ‘edit_form_after_editor’

Allow ordering posts by IDs passed to ‘post__in’

Check a post type’s ‘show_in_admin_bar’ property for ‘View’ and ‘Edit’ object Toolbar links

Bug Fixes

Incorrect URL for second page of search results

Re-enable redirect_canonical for IIS

Handle https for all oEmbed providers

Fix featured image overflowing its meta box in certain situations

Fix issue where $format and $link arguments were not being preserved in previous|next_post_link filters

Fix issue with sideloaded images not making it into the correct upload directories

Fix multiple captioned image insertion problems in post editor

Multisite

Multisite: Allow home page of sub-directory sites to resolve regardless of capitalization

Multisite: Introduce get_space_used() and upload_is_user_over_quota() for gauging more accurate quotas

Multisite: Make it easy to replace or augment the over-quota message

Classes

Fix tax query returning all results when empty

Add get() and set() methods to WP_User_Query for modifying query variables the way you might with WP_Query

Add meta queries support to WP_Comment_Query and WP_User_Query just like WP_Query

Functions

Allow count_many_users_posts() to count only public posts

Add ‘order’ to wp_get_archives()

Allow passing stdClass and WP_User to wp_insert_user() and wp_update_user()

Fix issue where get_blog_id_from_url() did not always return an int

Fix the matching in is_email_address_unsafe(), which was too aggressive

Give System temporary directories preference in get_temp_dir() for better Windows compatibility

Hide UI for attachment taxonomies if ‘show_ui’ is ‘false’ for that taxonomy

Introduce get_edit_user_link() for more direct user-edit links

Introduce wp_cache_switch_to_blog() and WP_Object_Cache::switch_to_blog() to more efficiently switch the cache to a new blog id

Introduce clean_blog_cache()

Introduce wp_checkdate()

Introduce WP_Image_Editor class, abstracting GD from core, and introducing Imagick support

Introduce wp_prepare_attachment_for_js()

Introduce wp_send_json()

Introduce wp_send_json_success()

Introduce wp_send_json_error()

Introduce is_ms_switched()

Introduce wp_get_mime_types()

Introduce wp_oembed_remove_provider()

Introduce wp_clean_themes_cache()

Introduce set_url_scheme()

Make get_home_path() work in more cases by being case insensitive and sanitzing Windows paths

Make sure attachment_fields_to_edit() returns term slugs not term names

No markup is output if wp_nav_menu() has no menu items

Prevent child pages and child categories from being Settings Media Screen, assume they are set to default values

Return WP_Error object if the database insert in wp_set_object_terms() fails

Simplify protocol stripping in add_query_arg() by avoiding a regular expression

Soft-deprecated CUSTOM_TAGS in favor of wp_kses_allowed_html(), adds support for rel attributes

supports => false can be passed to register_post_type() to disable default title and editor

Trim incoming searches on the users list table

Welcome Panel and accompanying screen option removable via the welcome_panel hook

When reassigning posts and links during user deletion, clear the post and link caches

WP_Tax_Query::transform_query() is now public

XML-RPC: Add the ‘home’ option to wp.getOptons

XML-RPC: Don’t use switch_to_blog() in wp.getUsersBlogs, improves performance and memory footprint

Filters

Add cron_request for filtering the cron_url in wp_remote_post()

Add login_body_class filter to login_header()

Add media_view_strings and media_view_settings filters. Use media_view_strings to filter ‘Insert into post’ button text

Add post_type_labels_{$post_type} to filter get_post_type_labels()

Add restrict_manage_comments hook to comments list table for better filtering capability

Add validate_password_reset filter, making it possible for plugins to enforce password rules

Add domain_exists filter for domain_exists()

Add wp_get_update_data filter making it easier for plugins to modify update count

Add wp_image_editors filter to allow adding to or modifying order of WP_Image_Editor engines

XML-RPC: Add xmlrpc_login_error filter to customize the IXR_Error returned when login() fails

External Libraries

Update to Jcrop 0.9.10

Update to jQuery 1.8.3

Update to jQuery Color 2.1.0

Update to jQuery UI 1.9.2

Update to SimplePie 1.3.1

Update to TinyMCE 3.5.8

Add jQuery Masonry for better custom header listings

Farbtastic color picker replaced with Iris color picker

Switch to .min for compressed JS and CSS files, e.g. .js becomes .min.js, .dev.js becomes .js

Allow protocol-relative URLs when registering/enqueueing scripts and styles

Prototype and Script.aculo.us local libraries unbundled from core, latest versions enqueued via ajax.googleapis.com

Deprecated Functions

Deprecate sticky_class() in favor of post_class()

Deprecate wp_cache_reset()

Deprecate wp_create_thumbnail()

Deprecate image_save_pre filter, which filters a GD Resource, for image_editor_save_pre, which filters a WP_Image_Editor object

Deprecate wp_save_image_file filter, which filters a GD Resource, for wp_save_image_editor_file, which filters a WP_Image_Editor object

Deprecate image_edit_before_change filter, which filters a GD Resource, for image_edit_before_change, which filters a WP_Image_Editor object

Deprecate jpeg_quality filter for wp_editor_set_quality, or WP_Image_Editor::set_quality() on an individual image, which sets compression quality for any supported format

Deprecate wp_load_image() in favor of wp_get_image_editor()

Deprecate image_resize in favor of WP_Image_Editor::resize()

Deprecate gd_edit_image_support() in favor of wp_image_editor_supports()

Download WordPress 3.5

You can get 3.5 right now by either updating from your WordPress dashboard or by going to wordpress.org and download the latest version.

Download

This article was originally published on WordPress 3.5 Elvin Is Released.