Named after Charlie Parker, WordPress 3.8 “Parker” was released at the end of last week. Uniquely so far for WordPress, this was a parallel development stream that has been running since 2012. It’s mission was to bring the administration of WordPress kicking and screaming into the mobile and flat-design world.
In fact, unless you administrate a WordPress installation or write content you’ll see no difference at all. For admins, it’s glorious with colour, pin-sharp icons, beautiful flat design and brilliant mobile/tablet support (an old bug bear, really). You can read and see more here.
Theme management and widget control is now a good deal easier. So, not such a big change, except it introduced the concept of parallel development streams – something the WordPress community is committed to in the future.
When are we upgrading clients? It’s been in beta since early November so we’ve already seen sight of it and planning is well underway. We’ll announce the roll-out plan, but it will be slick and quick – the pace of evolution is so fast we don’t want to leave anyone behind.
This is the last release of 2013, and brings the total number to 7 of full releases this year. The next version 3.9 will appear in early 2014 in advance promise of what version 4.0 holds.
