WordPress 4.5 is expected to be released during the second week of April, 2016, and so we thought we’d look around and see what’s new and up coming in this release.
For those of you who want go play NOW, you can have at it with the beta version on your computer or on a staging environment by using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.
Visual Editor Improvements
Most of us WordPress users spend most of our time making up and creating content. Therefore anything that can be done to make the actual writing experience better and faster is always a good thing.
This has been done incrementally before in other releases and WordPress 4.5 will bring some more new improvements to the standard core visual editor.
Inline Link Editing
WordPress already comes with many great time saving shortcuts, which all help you write faster. One of these shortcuts is CTRL+K (Command+K on Mac), which allows you to easily and directly insert links into your posts. By doing this, it opens the insert link popup, which is a bit distracting and an extra step.
In WordPress 4.5, pressing CTRL+K will show an inline insert link menu. Simply type the URL (or lets be honest Ctrl+V paste) and keep writing your post without removing your hands from keyboard.
More Inline Text Shortcuts like WordPress 4.3
Inline text shortcuts were intro’d in WordPress 4.3. These allowed you to quickly add formatting markup by using simple text shortcuts. WordPress 4.5 is now introducing more shortcuts like **bold** for bold and `code` for code.
Responsive Preview in Customizer
WordPress 4.5 will bring a very cool addition to the customiser, which we love the sound of. You will now be able to see responsive previews of your site directly in the customiser.
You click on the device icon at the bottom of the screen to switch the view between devices, et voila, you see the responsive in action. Currently it shows Desktop, tablet, and mobile device previews. This gives you a generic idea of how your site would look on these devices.
Allow Users to Login Using Email Address
Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the usernames we use across all the different sites and places. This is why many popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others also allow users to use their email address as username.
While you can easily forget your username, very few people forget their email address.
Since each WordPress user on your site already has an email address associated with their account, they will now be able to use their email address to login.
Theme Logo Support
The ability to add the theme logo directly from customiser has been asked for by users for years. Well now we have it! WordPress 4.5 will add this much wanted support theme logo directly to WordPress core.
You will have seen (we sure have) that already many premium WordPress themes allow you to upload your custom logo using the custom options panel. With the core support for the feature, it will now be become possible for you to do that directly in the theme customiser.
Improved Moderate Comment Screen
Many bloggers spend a ton of time having to moderate comments in WordPress. Comment moderation is a bug bare but a necessary evil that we all have to tolerate to combat the never ending barrage of comment spam.
WordPress sends you an email notifications when there is a new comment submitted if you set it up properly. By clicking on the approve, spam or trash link in the email takes you to a screen where you can see that comment with a button to perform the desired action (you have to be logged in of course).
However, this screen does not allow you to edit a comment, which is a monkey pain. Neither does it show you any formatting in comment text, which isn’t nice.
With the new WordPress 4.5, you’ll get to see a new and improved screen. It’ll show you the formatting in comment text as it would appear in a browser. It will also have a link to edit the comment.
Optimized Image Size Generation
WordPress introduced responsive images back in WordPress 4.4. This means that since then, users on smaller screens get to see a smaller image appropriate for their screen, kind of automatically. This feature is fab as it not only improves performance of most websites on those smaller screens, it also saves us all money on data plans, reducing the bandwidth used.
WordPress 4.5 will improve on this even more. It’ll optimize images further to reduce their site up to 50% without any visible quality loss. Of course we still recommend saving images optimized for web for best results.
So that’s the basics of what’s coming up in WordPress 4.5.
Hope you are looking forward to it as much as we are!
