WordPress 3.8, “Parker”, has just been released. WordPress 3.8 is the result of four months of hard work by 188 core contributors. Named after Charlie Parker, jazz saxophonist and bepob innovator. WordPress 3.8’s development was led by WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg.
WordPress 3.8 is the first release cycle ever where all major feature development began with plugin teams. The first brain storming session was August 8th, where people shared around twenty ideas for which plugins should be developed for inclusion into WordPress 3.8 as features.
Willing contributors chose which ideas they were interested in and teams formed around those that received early traction. While a number of teams are still in active development for future merges, four did proposals for inclusion in 3.8, and three features-as-plugins have shipped with the final release, plus Twenty Fourteen of course, the new WordPress default theme.
The most notable features of WordPress 3.8 are:
A new admin design (MP6)
The WordPress admin has changed a good deal over the years. You can take a walk through time with this blog post. The change in 3.8 is arguably the biggest ever, but definitely since WordPress 2.7, which was released in 2008.
Originally code-named MP6, the new admin design was first submitted to the plugin repository ten months ago; it was the most obvious choice for a plugin to be merged into core.
The entire administration area is now responsive. I think all images used for styles have been dumped and replaced by pure, modern CSS. Icons now utilize vector icons, called Dashicons. The default font is now the open source Open Sans.
Also, quite notably, there are now eight default skins that ship with WordPress core. This is made much easier thanks to new build tools that were adopted with the release of WordPress 3.7. With this opportunity, the WordPress admin styles were ported to utilize Sass, making building color schemes simpler.
I really look forward to a great deal more customization being made possible in the WordPress admin due to the groundwork in 3.7 with build tools (the WordPress Gruntfile is fun to explore) and adapting the admin in 3.8.
Mel Choyce also did an outstanding job outlining the changes in more detail in her proposal for the merge.
The Twenty Fourteen theme
Twenty Fourteen is a bold WordPress theme (view the demo), designed with a magazine layout.
It was originally released as a commercial theme on WordPress.com and for WordPress.org users on Creative Market. It did very well commercially. Many people were shocked this summer when it was announced (I believe on hack day) at WordCamp San Francisco that the $150 theme, that was then called Further, would be the next default WordPress theme.
You can learn many of the initial design considerations by Takashi Irie on his post on Theme Shaper where he describes designing Further / Twenty Fourteen.
Since that initial design, dozens of theme developers have gotten their hands on it and given input to improve it. Twenty Fourteen was released on WordPress.com three weeks ago, where nearly thirty thousand blogs are using it already.
