Codenamed "Basie", the latest stable version of WordPress has been released. It brings a number of new and interesting features, which the WordPress team have obviously been working hard at.
Here's a quick summary of what's in version 3.7:
Background Updates: Finally, the core of WordPress will be automatically updated when there are new maintenance and security releases availabe. This is a good thing but it comes with a few caveats. Firstly, make sure your hosting package has enough memory and resources allocated to allow the upates to occur.
We've seen a number of cheap hosting packages which don't have the resources to facilitate any online updates, yet alone background updates. Make sure your hosting provider has provisioned enough resources to your plan to allow this. Secondly, this is for the core software only. You'll still need to update themes and plugins yourself or use a managed WordPress service to take care of the other updates.
Stronger Password Recommendations: As with any system accessible to the public, you need to ensure your passwords are secure. With hundreds of millions of hack attempts each day, you need to ensure your password is complex enough to beat these hackers. Conetix also recommends that you use different passwords for each system, that way if it's ever compromised the hackers won't have access to all of your systems.
Better global support: For those who run sites with international translations, WordPress 3.7 now includes faster and more complete translations.
There are also plenty of smaller changes as well, with over 400 bugs marked as fixed in this release too.
You can read the full release notes here: https://wordpress.org/news/2013/10/basie/
Conetix has a number of plans optimised for WordPress ranging from self managed all the way through to fully managed servers where we take care of all the updates, optimisations and security lockdowns. All our existing managed WordPress customers will have their systems processively upgraded over the next week!
