So Wordpress 3.6 Oscar has gone live, and this time it’s accompanied by a very slick video, almost Apple like in production.
The main headline features of WordPress 3.6 are:
- The Twenty Thirteen theme – which can only be described as gorgeous, with a rich colourful blogging centric design.
- New Revisions interface so that you can easily find changes and scroll between versions.
- Revamped Menus editor
- HTML5 media player now built in for native video and audio embeds.
The full list of updates and changes in WordPress 3.6 are on the Codex.
Genesis 2.0 and WordPress 3.6
Now that WordPress 3.6 is out in the wild, there are inevitably going to be a slew of updates to third party themes and plugins. It was in beta for long enough so there is not really any excuse for developers to be slow in updating.
However, the Genesis framework is promising something very much more that just a point-upgrade. Wordpress 3.6 paves the way for Genesis 2.0, complete with the ability to enable full support for HTML 5.
Studiopress released the beta version of Genesis 2.0 way back in May, along with the Sample child theme to complement it. The list of improvements is really quite impressive:
- As already mentioned, HTML5 Markup
- Microdata so that if a HTML 5 Genesis will output markup using microdata.
- Gone are some widgets (Latest Tweets, eNews) and the Fancy Dropdowns & post templates features to be replaced by Plugin functionality.
There are plenty of other enhancements too, such as:
- Renamed loop hooks for HTML5 which better describe their function
- Improved multisite support
- Improved widget support for PHP5
Genesis 2.0 is not out yet, but the only thing holding it back was the release of WordPress 3.6 so you can expect it very soon.
When considering whether or not to upgrade to Genesis 2.0 you can rest assured that Genesis remains fantastically backward compatible. The implementation of HTML5 is handled via a Child Theme setting, meaning that you can upgrade safely. More importantly it also means that a collection of new themes will be released over the coming weeks. Along with upgrades to some of the most popular existing ones.
So whilst a new version of WordPress is always reason to be happy, on this occasion it also means that the Genesis Framework is going from good, to very good.
