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WordPress 3.9 – Here’s What’s New

By Julie Lyons

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WordPress 3.9 has recently been relased. If your blog or website runs on WordPress, updating to the latest version is always recommended.

The latest update includes more than 200 changes, including:

  • Live Widget Previews in Theme Customizer: With WordPress 3.9, you are able to see live previews of widgets in the theme customizer. Widget Customizer now allows you to edit widgets, rearrange them, and even add new widgets.
  • Audio / Video Playlists: Users are able to create audio/video playlists. The audio/video playlists work as a shortcode just like image galleries. You can upload multiple audio/video files and add them as a playlist right from WordPress media uploader.
  • TinyMCE aka Visual Editor Updated: Visual Editor in WordPress is based on TinyMCE editor which is another open source software. TinyMCE recently released a major update to the software, and in this WordPress TinyMCE has been updated. This update resulted into many improvements in the Visual Editor. Some of these improvements are:
    You will be able to see live gallery previews in the visual editor. When you add a gallery to your posts, images will be displayed in a beautiful grid right inside the post editor.
  • Improved Add New Theme Screen: In the Themes screen there is a new, sleek and stylish UI to add new themes in WordPress. It fetches screenshot of the featured themes. You can also click on tabs to switch between popular tags, filters and search for new themes from the official theme directory.
  • For Developers:
    • WordPress Image Crop position: Up until now additional image sizes were cropped to center horizontally and vertically. In this recent release, there is an image crop position that allows developers to decide the crop position. (#19393)
    • Autosave Refactored: Autosave had many “moving parts” and over the years there were a lot of additional functions “pinned” to it. In WordPress 3.6 most of the additional functionality was moved to heartbeat. In this release, saving of post data is moved over to heartbeat as originally planned. (#25272)

This is a very exciting new release, especially with the visual editor updates. According to WordPress, this will greatly improve post writing experience for many WordPress users. 

 

For additional details and screenshots on WordPress 3.9, review their full news article: What’s Coming in WordPress 3.9 (Features and Screenshots)