WordPress.org has released details on the next version of WordPress, v.35, now in Beta 2 release. There are more than 200 contributors, and a few hundred changes and improvements to version 3.5. They are planning a December 5th release for WordPress 3.5, but here’s what’s coming…

Beta 1 includes:

In just three short months, we’ve already made a few hundred changes to improve your WordPress experience. The biggest thing we’ve been working on is overhauling the media experience from the ground up. We’ve made it all fair game: How you upload photos, arrange galleries, insert images into posts, and more.

• Appearance: A simplified welcome screen. A new color picker. And the all-HiDPI (retina) dashboard.
• Accessibility: Keyboard navigation and screen reader support have both been improved.
• Plugins: You can browse and install plugins you’ve marked as favorites on WordPress.org, directly from your dashboard.
• Mobile: It’ll be easier to link up your WordPress install with our mobile apps, as XML-RPC is now enabled by default.
• Links: We’ve hidden the Link Manager for new installs. (There’s a Links plugin to add it back, but it’s so rarely used these days, it’s being removed from the core files.)

Beta 2 includes:

• New workflow for working with image galleries, including drag-and-drop reordering and quick caption editing.
• New user interface for setting static front pages for the Reading Settings screen.
• New image editing API.

Features  for theme and plugin developers in beta 1 and 2 include…

• External libraries updated: TinyMCE  3.5.6. SimplePie 1.3. jQuery 1.8.2. jQuery UI 1.9 (and it’s not even released yet). We’ve also added Backbone 0.9.2 and Underscore 1.3.3, and you can use protocol-relative links when enqueueing scripts and styles.
• WP Query: You can now ask to receive posts in the order specified by post__in.
• XML-RPC: New user management, profile editing, and post revision methods. We’ve also removed AtomPub.
• Multisite: switch_to_blog() is now used in more places, is faster, and more reliable. Also: You can now use multisite in a subdirectory, and uploaded files no longer go through ms-files (for new installs).
• TinyMCE: We’ve added API support for “views” which you can use to offer previews and interaction of elements from the visual editor.
• Posts API: Major performance improvements when working with hierarchies of pages and post ancestors. Also, you can now “turn on” native custom columns for taxonomies on edit post screens.
• Comments API: Search for comments of a particular status, or with a meta query (same as with WP_Query).
• oEmbed: We’ve added support for a few oEmbed providers, and we now handle SSL links.

For all the details, see their site.