To me Wordpress is one of the most important things to happen to the internet, Not Facebook, not Twitter. Wordpress has democratized creating a site and helped millions of people create an online business, community, blog, helping bring in massive amounts of revenue for small business owners.<p>I've got 4 sites running wordpress: my portfolio, my online store, a design database for items under $50, and a magazine cutout marketplace. (See my profile for links) Those last two I mentioned took less than a week to tweak and hack together thanks to the speed and ease of setting up wordpress sites.<p>It's sad that Matt Mullenweg never got the same recognition that Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg got. He definitely deserves it. We've got to stop only celebrating and worshiping people who make money. I think Matt empowered people just as much if not more.
The automatic background updates feature might be the most important feature of all in 3.7. Hopefully this goes a long way to plug some of the rampant security issues that plague the CMS because of failure to update to a later version. The new date querying features are also a welcome addition as it has been notoriously hacky in prior versions querying advanced date values in Wordpress and finally we search has been given a little love and is no longer so horrible that it requires a third party plugin to fill the void. Best version of Wordpress to date by far, wonder how they can top this list in 3.8.
I for one am very excited about all of the new functions and classes available. <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.7" rel="nofollow">http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.7</a> - things like wp_extract_urls() and a WP_Http_Streams class look really exciting.<p>Not so excited about auto updates, but every site I build is in some kind of version control anyway.