WordPress 3.7.1: A Historical Maintenance Release

“Zero Clicks Given” tshirt – courtesy of @dimensionmedia

Most WordPress maintenance releases are nothing to write home about, but WordPress 3.7.1 is one for the history books. This is the first maintenance release where users don’t have to lift a finger to get their sites upgraded.

Sites already running WordPress 3.7 will soon be automatically upgraded to the latest and greatest.

The release haiku, created by Mark Jaquith, sums it up nicely:

Just a few fixes
Your new update attitude:
Zero clicks given

WordPress 3.7 is rapidly approaching two million downloads. That’s a huge number of site admins who don’t have to worry about logging in to perform updates. WordPress core developer Andrew Nacin said that maintenance and security releases are likely to be a more frequent occurrence now that they don’t have to worry about update fatigue. If you’re wondering how long your site will take to update to WordPress 3.7.1, Nacin estimated 24 seconds. He’s probably done this a thousand times while testing:

Installs take about 24 seconds to update on average, but that includes downloading and unzipping the package. A core update should put your site into maintenance mode for only a few seconds.

This release includes 10 fixes for small bugs in 3.7. Check out the full changelog to get the details.

You can update your site immediately or wait until the core team starts rolling out the automatic background updates. I suggest you go crack yourself a cold one and let WordPress do the work for you.