WordPress 4.3 Beta and some fun features

WordPress 4.3 is chugging along toward it’s slated August release. Beta 1 was released on July 2nd. The release includes a number of big new features, and a couple of smaller features I personally am excited about.

The release post by release lead Konstantin Obenland highlights some major changes:

• An unsung hero of this release cycle is the new password management flow. WordPress will be much safer thanks to the work in #32589.
• The effort that has gone into supporting favicons, via the new “Site Icon” feature, is somewhat insane. I can’t help but think how silly it is the amount of work required to support favicons/icons across various devices and platforms. The patch is currently set for hitting the General Settings screen (screenshots), and a customizer version is in progress. I’m not sure if that will hit 4.3 or not.
• Admin list views are getting more attention, in order to prevent truncation on small viewports.
• The text editor continues to evolve nicely. The work on both the visual editor and text editor the last several releases has been awesome. The writing experience in WordPress continues to evolve; some basic inline markdown conversion is now going to be supported by default.
• You all know the story of the menus going into the customizer, and it’s on schedule to be included with 4.3.

And there are some other changes that have gotten good feedback too:

• Two of my recommendations for WordPress comments from last year are going into WordPress 4.3. First, comments will now be off by default on pages, which is overdue and awesome. Second, the allowed tags note in the comment form is being removed. I include this because I find it necessary to link my own props — vanity baby. These are good steps for better comment handling in WordPress.
• Singular.php is being introduced to handle single post templates across post types. I long enjoyed this feature with Hybrid Core’s template hierarchy, so it’s good to see it in core now.
• PHP 4 style constructors have been deprecated, and over 4,000 plugins are affected by the change. You can search for your plugins in Chris Christoff’s list.

This is, of course, just some of what’s happening in 4.3. You can see all Make Core posts tagged 4.3, and you should definitely start testing this release if you haven’t already.