WordPress Release: 3.7.3

TL;DR

WordPress 3.7.3 is a maintenance release that fixes critical issues with the Quick Draft feature and bulk post editing functionality. This update ensures auto-drafts are properly promoted to draft status and prevents data loss when using the Quick Draft widget. It also resolves a bug where bulk editing posts could inadvertently overwrite author and comment status settings across multiple posts.

Highlight of the Release

• Fixed Quick Draft functionality to properly promote auto-drafts to draft status
• Recovered auto-drafts that were previously lost when using Quick Draft
• Fixed bulk editing functionality to prevent unintended changes to author and comment settings

Migration Guide

No migration steps are required for this update. This is a maintenance release that fixes bugs without introducing any breaking changes or requiring configuration adjustments.

Upgrade Recommendations

All WordPress users running version 3.7.x are strongly recommended to upgrade to 3.7.3 as soon as possible. This release fixes critical bugs that could lead to data loss when using the Quick Draft feature and unintended changes when bulk editing posts. The update is backward compatible and should not cause any disruption to your site.

Bug Fixes

Quick Draft Fixes

• Fixed an issue where edit_post() wasn't properly promoting auto-drafts to draft status, causing Quick Draft functionality to fail
• Implemented recovery mechanism for auto-drafts that were lost via Quick Draft
• Resolved issue #27734 related to Quick Draft functionality

Bulk Edit Fixes

• Fixed a bug where bulk editing posts could inadvertently overwrite author and comment/ping status settings across multiple posts
• Reverted previous fix ([27992]) that did not properly address the issue for authors and comment/ping status
• Resolved issue #27792 related to bulk post editing

New Features

No new features were introduced in this maintenance release. WordPress 3.7.3 focuses exclusively on fixing bugs related to post editing functionality.

Security Updates

No security fixes were included in this maintenance release.

Performance Improvements

This release does not contain any specific performance improvements. The focus was on fixing critical bugs in the post editing functionality.

Impact Summary

WordPress 3.7.3 addresses two significant bugs that affected content creation and management workflows. The Quick Draft fix ensures that users can reliably create draft posts without losing content, which is particularly important for sites where multiple authors frequently save draft content. The bulk edit fix prevents unintended changes to post metadata when editing multiple posts simultaneously, maintaining data integrity across the content management system.

These fixes, while targeted at specific functionality, have a broad impact on the reliability of WordPress as a content management platform. Content creators and administrators can now work with greater confidence that their post data will be properly saved and that bulk operations won't have unexpected side effects.