WordPress 4.3 is due on Tuesday, 18th August. Here is a brief run down of all the coming changes, enhancements and bug fixes.
- PHP4 style constructors deprecated – This is really the big change in preparation for PHP7 that really shouldn’t trip anyone up but probably will
- Comments turned off by default for new pages – Yay!
- Singular.php is now a thing – Template that works for any single post of any post type
- Editor changes and enhancements – Visual & text modes both run through the same filters now. Loads of nice keyboard shortcuts added as well. Word/character count has also been made more accurate
- Site icon api added to manage your favicons and new Customizer controls added
- Customizer also has also had fast preview enabled for menus and changes to panels and sections
- Header tags in admin – Have correctly been changed to <h1> now
- Multisite updates – Namely the new get_main_network_id() which is pretty swish
- Passwords now strong by default
- get_transient() is stricter – Bug fix to stop unexpected behaviour
- Old Distraction Free Writing code now removed
- Old Theme preview code now removed
- List tables have API and UI changes – Now easier to subclass and set primary column, (last time I used WP_List_Table I wanted to shoot myself, hopefully this will help prevent that!).
You can find the official release notes here. And download the pre-release candidate to test your themes and plugins here.
Please, please, please download it and test your plugins, it only takes a few minutes and will potentially save a load of heartache for other people.