Faced any problem with WordPress till now? The solution for every bug is here. WordPress 4.9 has arrived! It was released yesterday on 15th of November named after Jazz musician Billy Tipton “Tipton”, loaded with all new 188 features by the contributors. About 443 WordPress enthusiasts took part in enhancing this amazing CMS. Among these 443 contributors, 185(almost 42%) contributors were the one who contributed to the innovative edition for the very first time.Let’s have a look at the latest features:Majorly Improved Customizer:
- Draft & Schedule Changes
This time WordPress Customizer has come up with various innovative features. Prior to this update, users had to save their edits immediately or they would lose them. They used to get a preview of changes but in order to this update, WordPress developers will now be able to draft and schedule their changes. Sharable preview link will improve the experience as developers can collaborate their work and improve their WordPress Development.So, now users can create a new set of content for instance pages, widgets and can schedule them for the date to be published.
- Search Themes in Customizer
Users can now directly search for the themes from the customizer. This facilitates with browsing and preview themes, with the included interfaces filters, subjects and layout.However it does not contain featured, latest, popular or favorites tabs, so, for that you will need to go back to the admin page.
- WordPress 4.9 has improved menu creation process with less time consumption and with user friendly interface.
Enhanced Code EditingCode editing has always created uncertainty in WordPress. This 4.9 update has some long-awaited improvements like syntax highlighting, linting and auto-completion to the code editors with the Codemirror library. These features are available in the theme and plugin editors, custom HTML widget and additional CSS box in the customizer.Although these features comes with prominent warnings about editing of themes and plugins and protection against saving code that would cause a fatal error.
Core Gallery Widget
There comes an addition in the code media widgets “New Gallery widget”. This widget has same features that have long been available in the post and page editors.
Users can embed media in the Text widget that includes images, video, audio by clicking the “Add media”. Addition of these features has brought one more bigger improvement in the update. In order to make this “Media” changes done contributors needed to add shortcode support to widgets which has been requested for a long long time! Yay! So from now thousands of WordPress sites will no longer need additional code from other plugins and themes for using shortcodes in widgets.
Widgets have also been updated for a better migration experience for mapping widgets with updated logic between two themes’ widget areas.
Come and Contribute!
For the first time ever admin users will get a notice in “about.php” page regarding the invitation to users to help, test or contribute to Gutenberg after updating to the latest WordPress 4.9 update.
If you are new to this let me first introduce you to the Gutenberg.
Gutenberg project has been getting a lot of attention from past months as every WordPress enthusiasts is looking forward to the WordPress 5.0 update which is going to introduce a new editor to the developer world! Although contributors have worked really hard to make this WordPress 4.9 for improved experienced and giving new opportunities to users with widgets and other features.
Wrapping up!
This new update was led by Weston Ruter and Mel Choyce!
That’s all folks! Now go and download the latest version from here. If you have any query regarding the updation you can contact our talented WordPress developers.
