WordPress is Free and open source software, built by a distributed community of mostly volunteer developers from around the world. WordPress comes with some awesome, worldview-changing rights courtesy of its license, the GPL.
It is more polished and enjoyable than ever before. Here what is new in WordPress v3.5.
New Media Manager
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_Query classes now support meta queries just like WP_Query. Meta queries now support querying for objects without a particular meta key.
Post Objects
Post objects are now instances of a WP_Post class, 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 and Backbone JavaScript libraries. TinyMCE, jQuery, jQuery UI, and SimplePie have all been updated to the latest versions.
