First look at WordPress 4.0
Published: July 2014
It’s been 4 years since WordPress 3.0 was released and it has continued to expand both as a web platform and in its usage by the wider community. So four years on and we are looking at WordPress 4.0! The beta is available for download for those who want an insight into what’s up and coming and I’ll be talking about the major changes and new features in this article.
So what’s new in WordPress 4.0?
Live previewing of embedded content – A nice feature that means when you add a YouTube video or some other form of media to your website, you’ll instantly get a live preview rather than the old grey box that takes up lots of space. This is great as it cuts down the time you need to preview and amend your content and allows you to work more closely to the experience of the users.
Extended language support – You can now select a language during the install process making WordPress more accessible to those who don’t use the English language. In addition, searching for themes and plugins will be filterable by language as well. Not a big change for myself but I’m all for a more diverse and accessible internet.
Streamlined Media Library – So at the moment we have a media library that lists all our items and we can carry out a few basic actions or view them which takes us to a page where we can edit the media item. This entails a lot of scrolling to search for items and also a lot of page load time if you’re trying to edit multiples. WordPress 4 gives us a shiny new grid view for easier access and also doesn’t require us to load new pages when editing and it even allows us to navigate to the next or previous items when editing. Streamlining is exactly what they’ve done – a good job.
So those are some of the features you can actually test out in the BETA release and report back to WordPress with how you got on and you can post your feedback or any bugs you find on the forums here.
Other areas that have been rebuilt include:
- Plugin management – Easier to install and manage Plugins with the new interface.
- Customiser – The use of panels however, this is not set in stone yet.
- TinyMCE Views – Some of you know this as the WYSIWYG editor, there are some revamps here, more info will be coming soon.
So that’s a first look at WordPress 4.0, if you like what you’re reading then you’ll be happy to know that it’s due for release next month so keep an eye out for that and for our following WordPress Weekly posts which will be full of tutorials and tips on using WordPress 4.0.
