WordPress 3.8.1 Released: Fixes Twitter oEmbed Issues

WordPress 3.8.1 was released today with more than 30 tickets resolved for this milestone. Automatic background updates will be gradually rolled out over the next 24 hours.

One of the most notable fixes was switching Twitter oEmbed to SSL. Twitter changed its API, which broke Twitter oEmbed links across all WordPress installations. If you’ve got a lot of content with embedded tweets, then upgrading to WordPress 3.8.1 should be a high priority for you.

Additionally, WordPress 3.8.1 addresses some issues with taxonomy queries in WP_Query, general fixes for the newly designed admin areas and resolves a strange bug with “dead zones” on submit buttons.

An Impressive Success Rate For Automatic Updates

Skeptics of WordPress 3.7’s automatic updates feature may be interested in looking at the results so far. The success rate for automatic updates with WordPress 3.8 was astonishing, given that it was a major release, with many major changes. Andrew Nacin cites the stats for critical failures:

Success rate is around 99.78 percent of about 15,000 updates. That’s a bit lower than 3.7.1, which was 99.988 percent for about a million updates. This is to be expected; for example, far more files were changed.

When referring to critical failures, Nacin clarifies that these are not disaster scenarios, as the term might seem to indicate. “Remember that a critical failure (what these numbers are calculating) only means ‘we started to copy files and failed to verify we copied all of them’,” he clarified. “It doesn’t mean the site crashed and burned.”

These stats are good news for any WordPress admin who has been hesitant to have automatic background updates turned on for minor releases. If you previously had background updates turned off, now might be a good time to consider re-configuring your settings to include automatic core updates for minor releases.