WordPress has announced the release of WordPress 4.9 “Tipton”, a new update to the popular blogging and CMS platform you can use to create a website. The latest version of WordPress brings a range of new features and bug fixes.
How do I update?
If you have automatic updates enabled then the good news is your websites will be updated for you without you needing to lift a finger.
Manually updating WordPress is simply a case of logging in to your WordPress Dashboard, clicking Updates then Update Now. Just remember to take a quick backup before updating.
Key Feature Updates in WordPress 4.9
Draft and Schedule Theme Changes in Customiser
It’s now possible to save changes you make to your WordPress site in customiser as a draft. This means you, or your other site editors can review the pending changes and choose whether to publish or discard them.
Auto-saves of your customiser changes are also available, so you’ll never lose a change again by accidental ‘back’ clicks or 4G connection drops. Another new feature is scheduling which allows you to publish customiser site changes at a set date.
Super useful for seasonal campaigns like Christmas or New Year sales. You can also use the new ‘Share Preview’ link to share a preview of your latest changes with anyone without access to customiser.
The link will be very handy for you to preview frontend changes with your clients / team members without admin access.
New WordPress theme browsing in customiser
Changing themes has been added to customiser. This new feature makes it easier to browse, download and live preview a new theme for your WordPress site directly from customiser.
Gallery widget
Hot on the heels of the audio widget in WordPress 4.8 is the new WordPress gallery widget. This new widget lets you quickly and easily create galleries which can be dragged and dropped into widget spaces on your WordPress site.
Add media button in text widgets
You can now add images to widgets by clicking a simple ‘Add Media’ button. No need to write any code to add images!
Easier menu creation
Menus are now even simpler and easier to add to your website through the newly improved and much more intuitive add menu process added to customiser in WordPress 4.9.
The new process guides you step-by-step through creating, placing and adding pages to your menus. Navigation has never been easier!
Embed videos from Facebook and more
Currently, it’s only possible to add videos from YouTube and Vimeo to the Video Widget. WordPress 4.9 adds oEmbed support which means it’s now possible to add videos from other video hosting providers. This makes it possible to include your videos directly from Facebook!
New WordPress developer features
WordPress dev’s also benefit from the much improved inbuilt code editor. The new Syntax highlighting, code suggestions and auto-completion helps avoid code errors from typos and let’s you quickly add and edit code on your WordPress sites. Saving you time and money.
And there’s more…
WordPress 4.9 brings over 600 fixes and enhancements so there are lots of changes under the hood. A full list of the changes in the update is available via an accompanying release note.
What’s coming soon from WordPress?
Work is already underway on the next major version of WordPress, which hopes to include a newly designed frontend editor called ‘Gutenberg’ which will make creating websites with WordPress even easier and faster than before.
