"Colorful dreidels2" by Adiel lo - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
“Colorful dreidels2” by Adiel lo – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

WordPress 4.1 is the fourth major version of WordPress and the sixth overall version of WordPress released during the festival of Hanukkah.  The first release during latke time was WordPress 1.2.2 which came out on December 15, 2004. It was a patch release and the notes highlight it as:

This release fixes a few bugs and security issues and is recommended for all 1.2 users.

The following year, the first major release during Hanukkah took place when WordPress 2.0 “Duke Ellington” was released.  This release featured WYSIWYG editing, and many other great features.  My favorite part of the release notes is this gem:

Faster Administration — Call it AJAX, call it DHTML, call it Larry, but we’ve paid close attention to streamlining some of the most common tasks in managing your blog

It would be four years before the next WordPress release during Hanukkah when WordPress 2.9 “Carmen McRae” was released on December 19, 2009.  Carmen featured trashing posts, a built in image editor and a feature that has continued to be updated (including in 4.1)

Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

The following year, WordPress 3.0.3 was released on December 8, 2010. This release was a security release that fixed some XMLRPC security bugs.

After taking 2011 off, WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” was released on December 11, 2012. It featured a long desired update to media.  It also brought in a new default theme (just in time)

3.5 includes a new default theme, Twenty Twelve, which has a very clean mobile-first responsive design and works fantastic as a base for a CMS site.

Last Hanukkah was an early one (and featured a rare Thanksgivukkah ).  While there was no major release, RC1 of WordPress 3.8 came out on December 4, 2013.

A few more releases and we’ll be able to create a WordPress menorah.