Introducton

Wordpress released a major upgrade, Wordpress 3.6, as recently as August 2013. By 24th October, their R&D team had miraculously come up with what their website link: http://wordpress.org/news/2013/10/basie/ says are “some of the most important architectural updates (they’ve) made to date”.

And that’s Wordpress 3.7: named “Basie” in honour of the jazz musician “Count” Basie, and also the subject of this post.

Basic Features of WordPress 3.7

The highlights of this release are:

1. Automatic Update Feature

The automatic update feature built into Wordpress 3.7 means that you get spared the pain of checking for updates and then installing them. From November onwards, you can make Wordpress updates just as simple as updating Firefox - you wouldn’t even know when it happened!

2. Freedom To Perform Updates Mannually

Fortunately for web admins with a more cautious approach, you have the freedom to choose whether to update manually, to allow automatic updates to the core while you update plugins and theme skins manually, or to make all updates automatic.

3. Better Security

Increased password security. Clearly, Wordpress is very concerned about page security at the moment. While advanced hackers don’t need passwords to enter a website, it’s always good to set up a strong password as an entry-level line of defence.

That’s why Wordpress has updated its inbuilt password meter to warn its users against using common and easily-guessed strings. From names, dates and keyboard sequences (QWERTY or 12345) right down to popular culture, the meter recognizes and cautions against using them all.

4. Native Search Feature

Wordpress native search. Finally, we have a long-awaited update to Wordpress’ native search tool. While this tool has existed for more than five years, very few people chose to use it because it was, in a word, crap. With this new update, we finally get search results sorted by relevance rather than date, and ones that include all permutations and combinations of the search terms entered.

Previously, we would’ve been stuck with only exact matches for the full string entered. Given the fact that Google is turning up fewer and fewer relevant results by the day, I’m sure a lot of people are looking forward to the development of this search engine.

5. Global Language Support

Global language support. English is not the only language on the Internet, and Wordpress is slowly making changes to incorporate other-language users. From now on, non-English users will automatically receive any available theme updates in their chosen language. bugs have been fixed

6. Automatic Software Update

Automatic software updates. While around 20% of all the websites on the Internet run the Wordpress software, 47% of these pages run an out-of-date version. This means that almost 10% of all the websites on the Internet are running outdated software. This in turn means that they don’t have the latest security updates, making them even more vulnerable to malware and hackers.

Apart from those listed, there have been certain other changes on which Craig Buckler on Sitepoint (http://www.sitepoint.com/whats-new-wordpress-3-7/) has given us the developer’s point of view.

While Wordpress 3.6 “Oscar” gave us several more options for posts, edits and the Wordpress dashboard, “Basie” is more of an under-the-hood upgrade that quietly keeps your page tuned to the finest degree.