The latest version of WordPress was just released, after a slight delay due to some bugs in the editor and such, but those have been all hammered out now. The new Media Manager got a major overhaul, so enjoy that. It also got some user interface polish, now supports Retina and HD displays, and some performance improvements as well. We’ve installed it and haven’t seen any issues, it’s looking amazing. Go update those web sites!

New Media Manager

(Here’s an interesting link to the wireframe overview of the new Media Manager user interface design from back in July: http://make.wordpress.org/ui/2012/07/30/media-wireframes/ )

Beautiful Interface

Adding media has been streamlined with an all-new experience, making it a breeze to upload files and place them into your posts.

Picturesque Galleries

Creating image galleries is faster with drag and drop reordering, inline caption editing, and simplified controls for layout.

New Default Theme

Introducing Twenty Twelve

The newest default theme for WordPress is simple, flexible, and elegant.What makes it really shine are the design details, like the gorgeous Open Sans typeface and a fully responsive design that looks great on any device.Naturally, Twenty Twelve supports all the theme features you’ve come to know and love, but it is also designed to be as great for a website as it is for a blog.

Retina Ready

So Sharp You Can’t See the Pixels

The WordPress dashboard now looks beautiful on high-resolution screens like those found on the iPad, Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 10, and MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Icons and other visual elements are crystal clear and full of detail.

Smoother Experience

Better Accessibility

WordPress supports more usage modes than ever before. Screenreaders, touch devices, and mouseless workflows all have improved ease of use and accessibility.

More Polish

A number of screens and controls have been refined. For example, a new color picker makes it easier for you to choose that perfect shade of blue.

Under the Hood

Meta Query Additions

The WP_Comment_Query and WP_User_Queryclasses now support meta queries just likeWP_Query. Meta queries now support querying for objects without a particular meta key.

Post Objects

Post objects are now instances of a WP_Postclass, which improves performance by loading selected properties on demand.

Image Editing API

The WP_Image_Editor class abstracts image editing functionality such as cropping and scaling, and uses ImageMagick when available.

Multisite Improvements

switch_to_blog() is now significantly faster and more reliable.

XML-RPC API

The WordPress API is now always enabled, and supports fetching users, editing profiles, managing post revisions, and searching posts.

External Libraries

WordPress now includes the Underscore andBackbone JavaScript libraries. TinyMCE, jQuery, jQuery UI, and SimplePie have all been updated to the latest versions.