WordPress 3.7 and All That Jazz Naming

WordPress 3.7 will be released any day now and it looks like the team at Automattic is advancing toward automation.

Automania

WordPress 3.7 has been called a “maintenance release” with a focus on stability and security improvements. Yet, it is also the first WordPress version configured to automatically upgrade minor versions of itself. Some day, you’re going to log on to your site to find – presto, chango! – you are suddenly working on 3.7.1.

And, this automania will apply to language packs as well.

Search Relevantly

It used to be that doing a search on a WordPress site would return a haphazard list of posts organized by date. No more! The WordPress 3.7 search algorithm will give results based on full sentence title matches, then all title search term matches, then any title search terms matches, etc.

That way, readers will get a better picture of what’s important on your site.

All that Jazz

Technical improvements aside, let me get superficial a moment to discuss who WordPress 3.7 will be named for.

Being a HUGE jazz fan, I think it’s awesome that Automattic honors jazz musicians by naming WordPress versions after them.

My only beef is that 90% of the past versions are named for men.

Out of 19 named WordPress releases, only two are named for women: Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae. Both solid choices, but come on! Are they the only women jazz artists in the world?

No. So let me suggest a few gals for future versions.

Marian McPartland – recently deceased at the whopping age of 95, McPartland was a prodigy who played piano since the age of three. Classically trained, she started performing jazz in 1938 and toured the world. In 1978, she began interviewing jazz pianists and playing side-by-side pianos with them on the seminal radio show, Marian McPartland’s Piano JazzNPR’s longest-running cultural program ever! She was a jazz institution!

Sarah Vaughan – a singer with one of the most amazing voices in jazz. Sarah Vaughan was a Grammy Award winner and a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts “highest honor in jazz”, the NEA Jazz Masters Award. Send in the clowns, already.

Diana Krall – a still-living pianist, singer, composer and arranger, and the only jazz singer to have eight albums debut at the top of the Billboard Jazz Albums. So far, she’s won two Grammy Awards and eight Juno Awards and earned nine gold, three platinum, and seven multi-platinum albums! And, being Mrs Elvis Costello is merely a bonus.

Billy Holliday – no introduction necessary.

So come on, Automattic. Get hip to the jazz chicks! They can throw down a beat as hard as the cats and tech chicks will dig you for being hep to them.

And to my readers, what jazz artist would you name a WordPress version for?

 

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