Speaking of WordPress in general, you can of course acquire official direct news from WordPress News, but you can also take a peak behind the curtain and follow news in the making at Make WordPress.org. Though it’s only specific to the WordPress.com blogging platform, WordPress.com News is also worth watching for WordPress development news, as WordPress.com users often get access to new WordPress features before they’re released, so you’ll be able to try new features rather than just read about them.

There’s more news than just direct official news, like I said earlier, it’s everywhere. You could subscribe to every general news site, every core developer’s personal blog, every premium theme shop, and every plugin developer, but why not subscribe to a few curated news sources instead? I guess you could call WordPress Planet the official curated news source, but it’s really just a collection of all news items from a particular set of curated blogs. For specific news items curated from sources through the entire WordPress community, subscribe to Post Status, and don’t neglect the power of allowing the folks you follow on Twitter, Google+, and/or Facebook to curate news for you.

Speaking of the WordPress community, you should get involved if you aren’t already. If you don’t even use WordPress yet, it’s time to get started with either WordPress.org or with WordPress.com, share your thoughts with the world, and maybe spread some WordPress news on your blog too.

The news is out there, and it’s well within your reach. If you can’t find the news, it’s time to make your own.

WordCamp San Francisco 2013 will be held on July 26 and 27 at the Mission Bay Conference Center with a Developer Hack Day on July 28. A list of speakers is not yet available, but they would like you to nominate your favorite past WordCamp speakers.

Will you be attending WordCamp San Francisco this year?

At this time, WordPress 3.6 is not yet feature complete (meaning that all intended new features have not been entirely finished), so the decision was made to push the first beta release back two weeks to March 27 and the final release back one week to April 29. This will allow the team time to focus on finalizing the in-progress new features so that they (and the brave folks who enjoy running beta software) can simply focus on testing and bug fixing rather than polishing up partial features.

Web-based software, like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, are taking over the publishing industry and allow you to work from anywhere with an internet connection. Though, even though they can be managed  from home, working from home and maintaining a distributed workforce is not yet broadly acknowledged in society as a successful and efficient alternative to working in an office. Despite working with software that doesn’t need to be tied to one specific workstation, you could still find yourself tied to a desk in cubicle.

I work full-time for Automattic and have the pleasure of both working from home and setting my own hours. After all, I only need a browser, an email client, and IRC client, and Skype to do my job. A desk is nice, but there’s no one saying that said desk has to be in the dark corner of some corporate office. As for communication between the 150 of us (130 who work from home, far away from the central “office” in San Francisco), we communicate mostly via a variety of blogs running the P2 theme. It’s as close as you can get to a water cooler or a meeting room with text, you should try it. For other communication needs, we use primarily IRC followed by Skype for less work-related chats.

Do you work from home? And, if you work from home for a larger company (not just yourself), how is communication and overall efficiency maintained?

The goal for Twenty Thirteen is to offer “a focus on blogging, and great support for post formats (which are getting attention on the backend in 3.6 as well).”

If you’d like to see the theme in action, a demo site is available. One thing you’ll notice immediately is that the strong emphasis on whitespace, which has become commonplace in the default themes, is long-gone. Twenty Thirteen is making very bold use of its colors, offering a different color for each post format. The theme also lacks a sidebar by default. It’s designed to focus on blogging after all, so the designers prefer that you leave your widgets to the footer area, but it still does support a sidebar widget area if you really want to put something there.

This theme won’t be for everyone, and really no default theme should. Default themes should showcase the strength of each release’s new features and inspire customization. If you aren’t a fan of Twenty Thirteen, don’t worry, there are still over 1,600 themes to choose from, including Twenty Twelve.

Each theme is carefully scrutinized by at least two, if not four, of Automattic’s Theme Team focussing on code quality, usability, and potential theme-specific anomalies. The result is a theme that “just works” out of the box, with no annoying bugs or usability quirks.

Traditionally, things like this have been closely guarded secrets, but Automattic has publicly released their theme guidelines so anyone can benefit from them. These guidelines, are not a requirement if you want to just develop a theme for WordPress in general, but they are still some great coding practices worth following if you want your theme to “just work” too.

There were a total of 67 WordCamps this year, up from 52 last year, with 34 in the US and 33 outside of the US, serving over 17,000 attendees, with 967 sessions and 877 speakers, all made possible by 498 generous sponsors!

The amount of WordCamp videos published to WordPress.tv this year almost doubled to 445, probably due to the expansion of WordCamp Central’s video camera kit program, which does its best to make sure that every WordCamp has an affordable way to record every session. The program now holds 8 kits in the US, 3 in Canada, and 2 in Europe, so there’s probably a good chance that there’s a kit available for your WordCamp if you need it.

To kickoff 2013, the WordPress Events Contributor Group was launched, and is looking for volunteers for WordPress.tv moderation, materials for event planners, new WordCamp organizer mentorships, making it easier for organizations to sponsor multiple events, improvements to the WordCamp Base theme, and reviewing the current WordCamp guidelines.

WordPress is your blogging platform, and WordCamp is your event, so please feel free to pitch-in if, when, and wherever you can this year!

In particular, this release fixes a bug which could cause HTML elements to be unexpectedly removed by the Editor, fixes a bug which caused HTML elements to be unexpectedly removed from scheduled posts, provides workarounds for certain misconfigurations which could prevent JavaScript from loading in the Dashboard, and fixes three cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and one server-side request forgery vulnerability.

If you have trouble automatically updating to WordPress 3.5.1, you may be on an IIS server and will need to follow these instructions.

This is a security release, so it is recommended for all users. If you run into trouble with WordPress 3.5.1, stop by the master list of known issues and post to the support forums if your problem isn’t covered there.

• Menus have received a simplified UI by way of breaking elements up into two separate screens, a few extra hooks, and some accessibility tweaks.
• Post Formats will be getting some UI tweaks around theme usage and expectations of data.
• Editorial Flow will focus on how custom statuses relate to post types, the transition between statuses, and working with existing statuses.
• Autosave will focus on how to safely lock a post and still allow user control, autosaving to the browser’s local storage, and offering better warnings for login expirations.
• Revisions will focus on author attribution issues and improved usability.

If you aren’t already following along with the Make WordPress Core blog, I highly recommend doing so now, especially if you’re a plugin or theme developer, or just someone whose livelihood relies on WordPress in general. And, if any of the above looks like fun, why not get involved today?

• The Post Formats UI will be getting a major usability overhaul, lead by Helen Hou-Sandi.
• Autosave and Post Locking will be getting some new love, so you’ll hopefully never lose your posts again, lead by Andrew Ozz.
• The Editorial Flow experience will be getting a major overhaul too, lead by Daniel Bachhuber, so we can probably expect some bits of Edit Flow to make an appearance.
• Revisions will be getting some improvements, particularly in author attribution and comparing diffs, lead by Peter Westwood.
• Menus will be seeing some usability improvements, lead by Dave Martin.
• Distraction-Free Writing will be getting more visibility, a smoother experience, more features, and some overall polish. A leader for this project has yet to be chosen.

If you aren’t already following along with the Make WordPress Core blog, I highly recommend doing so now, especially if you’re a plugin or theme developer, or just someone whose livelihood relies on WordPress in general.

This handy report was generated for several WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered WordPress.org blogs with moderate to high traffic, and it really is quite nice. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from our report.

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 950,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 17 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

So, with visits from 217 countries world-wide, and the United States, India, and the United Kingdom rounding out the top, we had more visits than 17 years worth of tourists to a small European country. That’s not bad, but we could always do better.

What would you kind folks love to see from us in 2013?

2012 saw two major WordPress releases, addressing primarily theme customization and media management. There were also five security releases, a new default theme, and a record number of code contributions in the 3.5 release.

The site itself also saw some improvements, including a new plugin page design with plugin and theme reviews, and Make.WordPress.org, a network of sites where teams and contributors can easily communicate with each other.

Speaking of teams and contributors, 2012 also saw the very first WordPress Community Summit, a 2-day event attended by 108 of the top WordPress development, support, and overall community volunteers.

2012 was certainly a big year for WordPress, and with planning for WordPress 3.6 already underway, it looks like they’re going to hit the ground running in 2013.

The development on WordPress 3.6 will be lead this time by WordPress veteran Mark Jaquith, who is planning to focus this release on content editing improvements, listing “revisions, autosave, workflow, [and] editing modes” as suggested areas of focus. This is just his suggestion at this time, and a planning meeting in early January will further narrow down the focus to specifics.

Mark is also looking for a backup lead, who will help with “the planning, execution, and delivery of the release” and otherwise cover for Mark if he is unavailable. If you have experience with WordPress core development, apply now!

If you have not updated to WordPress 3.5 yet, why not help the download counter reach 2 million today? You can safely update from Dashboard -> Updates or download and update manually.

Make sure that you check out the new features, stop by the master list of known issues if you run into trouble, and post to the support forums if your problem isn’t covered there.

This release is packed with plenty of new features, like a completely redesigned media manager, the new default Twenty Twelve theme, support for Retina (HiDPI) displays in the Dashboard, and better accessibility for screen readers and touch devices.

If you run into trouble with WordPress 3.5, stop by the master list of known issues and post to the support forums if your problem isn’t covered there.