WordPress 3.9 is alive

So WordPress 3.9 has just been released. The release has brought with it a number of fantastic new features that any web designer will be happy about. The main focus for WordPress 3.9 was improvements to the editor among a handful of other features.

Here are the best new features of WordPress 3.9

The media editor

The editor as a whole has been updated to the most up to date version of 4.0. This means that the WordPress editor was able to drop old code and make way for a faster more streamlined user experience.

The visual editor has been significantly improved as well. It is much faster, more accessible and supports a mobile layout through responsive design. It is great to see simple improvements that further make WordPress so great. Some of these improvements include being able to drag media elements such as images directly into the editor and pasting text from your word processor without having to waste time with the formatting or messy styling incompatibilities.

Edit images easily

The new editor in WordPress allows you to edit images quicker and easier with the new crop and rotation tools. There are now little resize boxes on the images that allow you to make the image the exact size that you wish. I know alot of web designers will like this feature.

Drag and drop your images

Along with resizing and scaling images is the ability to drag them directly into the editor instead of having to import via the add media button. Simply drag the image from your desktop or other folder into the editor that you are working in. The WordPress editor will automatically upload them and allow you to choose which images to add in. It is features like these that are so very simple yet more than welcoming in WordPress to create a fast workflow for users.

Gallery previews

Another great feature of WordPress 3.9 is now the galleries will display previews of the images that are in that gallery. By having the gallery images in the editor, you can see quickly what images are in there and allow you to edit if needed without having to open the gallery editor.

Audio and video playlists

Both audio and video files can be turned into playlists without the need for any additional plugins or code. This makes this whole process so straightforward for users and it is great that these galleries can use modern HTML5 features.

Live widget and header previews

The theme customiser has also had an upgrade which allows you to live rearrange your site’s widgets right from the theme customiser. Once you have edited the widget, you just have to hit the save button and the changes will be made. Gone are the days where you might edit a widget and then visit your website to see everything has been broken. There are no more surprises with the live widgets feature.

Stunning new theme browser

The new theme browser lets you preview existing and new WordPress themes in a nice and new visual way.

Under the Hood

There have been a number of great features that have been updated “under the hood” of WordPress. Some of these features include:

Semantic Captions and Galleries

When developing a theme for your website our web developers have a handful of new options when creating images and galleries. These new options allow us to create modern and intelligent HTML5 marked-up code.

Inline Code Documentation

While working with WordPress, if we are needing to edit certain sections, now every action and filter hook is documented in WordPress. We will know exactly what needs to be done every time with each part of code and save time searching when new features are added.

External Libraries

A number of javascript libraries have been updated to the latest versions available including: the WordPress editor TinyMCE 4 and jQuery 1.11.

Overall a great new update for WordPress. We will continue to see new features and changes to WordPress over the coming releases. Will be interesting to see what we have in store for WordPress 4.0.

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