WordPress 3.9 “Smith” Is Available – Here’s What You Need To Know

WordPress 3.9—”Smith”—has been released! WP Engine will begin rolling out WordPress 3.9 updates in the coming weeks. Here is everything you need to know.

For non-security releases, we do not upgrade customers immediately. This is because our priority is the security and functionality of your sites. Since the release candidate period was extremely brief, we will start to roll out updates to 3.9 on Cinco de Mayo (Monday, May 5th).

Our system will send out two notices before the upgrade(s) start. One seven days prior to your scheduled upgrade and a second 4 hours before. Should you find, as the date gets closer, that you need more time to prepare your site(s) for the upgrade, we encourage you to contact our Support Team. They’ll be more than happy to work out a time frame for upgrading your site(s).

Please note that if you contact Support to delay the upgrade process they’ll need a list of every site on your account that needs to opt-out.

However, if you do prefer to update immediately, you can do so. Simply start a live chat requesting that we update your site(s). Someone from our Support Team will hand-upgrade your site using our Automated Upgrade Protection as soon as possible.

Our system will create a backup of the current state of your site. Then we’ll perform the upgrade to 3.9. As soon as the upgrade is complete, we’ll test the site to make sure your site is loading.

If the site loads, you’ll be notified that you’ve been upgraded to 3.9. Should something appear to be amiss, we’ll roll your site back to the previous version, and investigate what may have gone wrong. All this will happen without any intervention required from you.

What’s New in WordPress 3.9?

WordPress 3.9, named after jazz musician Jimmy Smith, includes a number of features to improve the writing and editing experience:

• Live widget management and previews have been added to the theme customizer.
• Audio & video playlist support has been added to the media uploader.
• Support for dragging & dropping image uploads directly into the post editor.
• Copy & pasting content written in Microsoft Word is now a much cleaner process.
• TinyMCE library updates have helped refine the look, feel and speed of the post & page editors.
• Image crop & rotation tools are now available directly in the post editor.
• Improvements to the theme browser.
• Meaningful tweaks to the autosave process.

Just to recap, we are scheduled to begin rolling out WordPress 3.9 to customers from May 5th onwards. But, if you would like to upgrade sooner, you are totally welcome to. Just start a live chat with our Support Team letting them know you want to upgrade sooner, and they can get that sorted for you.

Congratulations to everyone who was involved in developing WordPress 3.9!

If you want to hear more about WordPress 3.9, check out tonight’s DradCast. The special guest will be Andrew Nacin—who (along with Mike Schroder) was the Lead Developer for WordPress 3.9.