WordPress 3.7 (Basie) Changes

WordPress 3.7.1 has been released and the 3.7 release set (currently at 3.7.1) includes some great new features for WordPress customers. While maintaining your website on the most up-to-date release is a good security precaution, v3.7 brings three new features for end users. If you have not already contacted your web provider (or us) to upgrade your WordPress instance, you should do this immediately.

1. New Password Meter
The existing password meter (tool that calculates your passwords complexity) was pretty simple did not encourage strong enough passwords. With 3.7, the password meter has been rebuilt to push end users to use stronger passwords which helps tremendously with WordPress security.

2. WordPress Search Results
Search results now show up by relevancy instead of chronological order which helps get your end users to the content their looking for. Additionally this can also remove the need for 3rd party plugins search plugins on some sites helping to lower your plugin footprint.

3. Automatic Updates
The biggest change is that WordPress now supports automatic minor version updates. This means that WordPress can automatically update you from 3.7.1 to 3.7.2 and so on. Major updates, 3.7 to 3.8 for example are till down manually by an administrator. We suggest disabling both major and minor updates and applying these with your companies web provider as the automatic updates do nothing to ensure compatibility. While the updates are intended to be minor bug fixes, it is possible to update WordPress and break another plugin, say your store’s WooCommerce installation.