WordPress 3.4 Release Candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). 2 due to drop any moment, and we’re aim to do a final release of 3.4 early next week. Developers, this is your last pre-release opportunity to test your plugins and themes.
For 3.3, I wrote up a field guide of things developers need to know. For 3.4, I get to crowd-source it:
Custom Headers and Backgrounds. Chip Bennett posted a great summary of the API changes on the make/themes blog (versus network, site). Amy Hendrix posted about flexible custom headers. If you are a theme developer, I would strongly suggest you follow the make/themes P2.
Live Previews (The Customizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.). You’ll want to read Otto’s definitive post on the subject, How to leverage the Theme Customizer in your own themes.
New WordPress XML-RPC API An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.. If you’re interested in the new APIs for custom content types and taxonomies, check out the Codex page, put together by Max Cutler. Max also recapped the bug fixes, test coverage, and other changes on his blog.
Internationalization/Localization Changes. There’s a document on the translators P2 that outlines the numerous changes here.
That’s all we have for now! If there’s something we missed that deserves a writeup for developers, leave a comment and I’d be happy to make sure it gets written up here (under the field guide tag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.)).
#3-4, #field-guide
