
WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” Released - nosecreek
http://wordpress.org/news/2012/12/elvin/
======
NathanKP
There is a more technical list, including the details on the improvements for
developers here:

<http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.5>

The biggest thing I wish WordPress would add is a better built in system for
real templates, using a something along the lines of Twig
(<http://twig.sensiolabs.org/>).

That mixed PHP code and HTML in your standard WordPress template disgusts me
every time I see it. I know there are some custom solutions for creating real
templates in Twig, but this should be part of the mainstream WordPress branch.

~~~
huskyr
Yup, WordPress follows all bad practices of a typical PHP project: mixed PHP
and HTML all over the place, lots of global functions instead of classes and
direct calls to the MySQL functions instead of PDO so you can't use another
database like Postgres.

Pity it's so widely used, and there's little competition...

~~~
cooperadymas
Saying there's little competition is a huge stretch. WordPress is the dominant
force by a large margin. But from small static site generators, hosted
platforms, other open source alternatives, to enterprise-ready solutions there
are a lot of competitors hitting nearly every segment of the market.

<http://trends.builtwith.com/cms> provides some good trends of the big
players, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it.

That said, as a developer who has fallen into the WordPress business out of
necessity, there are a lot of great products out there that are built much
better than WordPress and I wish one of them were the dominant player. Still,
WP manages to get the job done most of the time.

~~~
intelliot
> there are a lot of great products out there that are built much better than
> WordPress and I wish one of them were the dominant player.

Honest question: Can you name one?

I'm seriously looking for a WordPress alternative, but I haven't found one
that is truly BETTER.

~~~
cooperadymas
What I mean by this is others have a better structured, more solid & easily
extendable code base, better separation between presentation and logic, etc..
Obviously, this is somewhat of an opinion, and it only refers to the
underlying structure. For the end user, WordPress is probably the best. A
large part of this is due to its ecosystem of plugins and themes. You
shouldn't need to build custom code on top of WordPress unless you are doing
something very unique, building an application (as opposed to a "website"), or
attempting to tie together several plugins.

Sticking with PHP, both <http://modx.com/> and <http://www.silverstripe.org/>
are fairly popular and well-built. I've also heard good things of
<http://www.concrete5.org/> , <http://www.movabletype.com/> ,
<http://textpattern.com/> , and <http://ellislab.com/expressionengine> .
<http://habariproject.org/en/> has also been built specifically to address
many of the faults in WordPress and other popular systems.

~~~
eclipticplane
Isn't MoveableType in Perl?

~~~
cooperadymas
Possibly - I've never done anything with it. The PHP statement was really only
for the first two, sorry for the confusion!

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DigitalSea
The media changes are a welcome addition, but I can't help but feel Wordpress
is still lacking in the media department quite a lot. One feature I've been
hoping for in terms of media management is folders to organise media instead
of paginating pages of all images being displayed which usually involves
duplicates being displayed. I love Wordpress, but it would be great to be able
to upload specific images for example of dogs into a folder called, "Dogs" and
then being able to browse and manage media in said folder.

It's great to see Wordpress is taking steps in the right direction with every
release. Another wishlist feature would be the integration of the Advanced
Custom Fields plugin straight into the core which allows you to add custom
meta boxes and fields to posts in a tasteful and aesthetically pleasing way.
I'm excited about the future of Wordpress, it's my bread and butter and I
don't see it being beat any time soon.

~~~
Otto42
Re: media, one step at a time. :)

Re: custom fields: This makes little to no sense to be in core, because custom
fields are just that, "custom". There's no point in giving the end user the
ability to make their own meta boxes hooked to custom post meta if there is no
plugin or theme actually using that meta data. Creating a meta box is
something that the theme/plugin should do, because it's actually going to use
the data gained from that meta box.

In other words, the horse goes in front of the cart, not the other way 'round.

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chrisblackwell
WordPress could really change their bad reputation by dropping support for PHP
5.2 in the next release, and requiring 5.3.

This would allow future WordPress developers to namespace their code, and out
allow simple closures withint your code.

As of PHP 5.5, there is no support for a straight mySQL connection. There is
no real downside in WordPress adopting the PDO standard.

~~~
Otto42
Somehow I doubt that we'll decide to drop support for 65.5% of our users
(roughly 26 million websites).

<http://wordpress.org/about/stats/>

~~~
rmccue
It's funny how many people say WP should drop 5.2 compatibility. It's
certainly possible to push the hosts towards using 5.3, but the fact is that
the user base simply isn't there yet.

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BUGHUNTER
Unfortunately there is still no reliable unattended upgrade process inluding
rollback (aka migration) for wordpress. I looked into this a little bit, but
there does not seem to be a reliable way to check if plugins have been
executed successfully and with expected results or not, so you never know
after an upgrade if your site is broken.

There are still many other issues with the code, but having a clearly defined
error-handling / -signaling for plugins would be the one single change that
would help in many problem areas of wordpress development - making rules and
knowledge about successful plugin execution and error handling obligatory for
plugin devs could be the one single change that could also help to reduce that
annoying flood of unbelievable bad code to be found in WP plugins repo.

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kyriakos
Twentytwelves mobile first approach for me is source of pain. They essentially
dropped support for IE8 and below which means people in corporate environments
like the company I work for who are stuck to windows xp due to other legacy
software that requires it cannot view the desktop view of themes based on
WordPress new default theme.

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earwolf
horrendous muffled voiceover on that video

~~~
Otto42
He's not muffled. He actually sounds like that. :)

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dave1010uk
Does anyone know if / when WordPress may start using a modern PHP framework
(eg zf2 / symfony2)?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Wordpress is its own PHP framework; in fact, PHP itself is a framework,
provides everything frameworks do from database querying to templating.

~~~
kalms
Calling Wordpress a framework is like calling Symfony a programming language.

~~~
smacktoward
Much like Drupal, WordPress can be bent into something vaguely resembling a
framework, if you're the type of person who enjoys that sort of thing. But
being the type of person who likes using WordPress as a general-purpose
framework is sort of like being the type of person who enjoys being tied up
and beaten with a rubber hose. It's a weird, weird kink.

~~~
kalms
Of the 2 I very much prefer Drupal. It's a bad CMS, but a great CMF. Wordpress
is in my opinion the exact opposite.

That said, I haven't checked out the last 2 versions or so.

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bdcravens
I wish they'd put some serious resources into dealing with comment spam. I
realize it'll always be an issue, but they could at least:

1) not make comments enabled out of box with no anti-spam measures (moderating
isn't anti-spam in my opinion: technical solutions should come before man-
power)

2) not make me rely on third-party plugins to combat it

~~~
DigitalSea
Akismet does a great job dealing with comment spam. Activate it and input your
API key and you're done. Even other applications like PHPbb and "insert PHP
content management system here" have problems with spam, it's not as easy as
you think to detect and deal with spam.

~~~
bdcravens
I've used other pieces of software, even some paid-for PHP features, so I
agree as to the spam problem. I was thinking more along the lines of disabling
comments by default, and making it a bit of a chore to enable, to make point-
and-click installs less of an attack vector.

