WordPress 3.5 “Elvin”

Extra! Extra! The latest WordPress release is fresh off the presses.

If you’ve been around WordPress a while, the most dramatic new change you’ll notice is a completely re-imagined flow for uploading photos and creating galleries. Media has long been a friction point and we’ve listened hard and given a lot of thought into crafting this new system. 3.5 includes a new default theme, Twenty Twelve, which has a very clean mobile-first responsive design and works fantastic as a base for a CMS site.

Did you read that right?! Yes. New media flow. Totes awes, batpeople. There is much more in this release but that alone should be enough to make you go update to 3.5 right this moment. WPCandy has a nice run-down of what’s new in 3.5. (Note: if your site is on WordPress.com you’ve been using this for a few weeks already. You are a future-living geek and didn’t even know it.)

Big shoutout to the core leads for 3.5, Andrew Nacin and Daryl Koopersmith for leading this release brilliantly. Fellas, I salute you. I’m thankful for your countless hours of sweat and tears to keep things on track.

On a personal level, I’m very proud to be a part of this project. I played a bigger part this time around, as one of the featured Contributing Developers for my role leading development on the new default theme, Twenty Twelve.

My Twenty Twelve teammates Konstantin and Drew were also featured as Recent Rockstars for their hard work on this new theme. (Side note: this is the TALLEST THEME TEAM EVER BUILT! With Drew and Konstantin both at 6 foot 7 inches I feel shrimpy at 6 foot 1 inch and three-quarters.)

And … another colleague of mine at Automattic, Matt Wiebe, is also on the Recent Rockstar page for his work on the new Iris color picker. Winnipeg + WordPress = Win.

Another personal note for WordPress 3.5: my wife and I were ecstatic to see our Adventures with Lance and Erin blog featured in the WordPress 3.5 introductory video! Wow. Too cool. Watch the video and look for three shots of our site in various modes of display (full desktop, mobile) around the 00:42 through 00:50 second marks. Super fun to see our website being displayed as a neat, real-world example of Twenty Twelve and WordPress in action.

I’m proud to be counted among the amazing number of WordPress contributors this time around—and, I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the next release.