WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan” is upon us!
WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan” was released today, named in honor of American jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan.
This release makes significant improvements to the new theme setup experience, inspiring the tagline:
Your site, your way.
Twenty Seventeen is making its debut in 4.7 as the first default theme designed for business. New features in 4.7 help you get your site set up the way you want it.
Your Site, Your Way
WordPress 4.7 adds new features to the customizer to help take you through the initial setup of a theme, with non-destructive live previews of all your changes in one uninterrupted workflow.
To help give you a solid base to build from, individual themes can provide starter content that appears when you go to customize your brand new site. This can range from placing a business information widget in the best location to providing a sample menu with social icon links to a static front page complete with beautiful images.
Don’t worry – nothing new will appear on the live site until you’re ready to save and publish your initial theme setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3BgYn-tUhE
Smoother and Easier Menu Building
Many menus for sites contain links to the pages of your site, but what happens when you don’t have any pages yet?
Now you can add new pages while building menus instead of leaving the customizer and abandoning your changes.
Once you’ve published your customizations, you’ll have new pages ready for you to fill with content.
Video Header Support in WordPress 4.7
WordPress 4.7 brings video header support for themes. Many free and premium themes were already allowing users to add full screen videos.
The video header feature will make it easier for theme developers to integrate it with in customizer with live preview.
Users can upload their own videos in mp4 format, or add a YouTube video.
As always, we Monkeys recommend adding any video to WordPress 4.7 using YouTube.
PDF Thumbnail Previews
Managing your document collection is easier with WordPress 4.7.
Uploading PDFs will generate thumbnail images so you can more easily distinguish between all your documents.
This feature creates an image for the first page of PDF document during upload.
This image is then stored in different sizes and is displayed in media library, media upload popup, and attachment pages.
WordPress 4.7 Dashboard in your language
Just because your site is in one language doesn’t mean that everybody helping manage it prefers that language for their admin.
Add more languages to your site and a user language option will show up in your user’s profiles.
How about some Starter Content Support for Themes
Now we get some lovely starter content added by Twenty Seventeen theme in WordPress 4.7 when we firtst start so we can see layout a LOT easier!
Some premium WordPress themes allowed their customers to import starter content when they purchased a theme. The purpose of this content is to immediately setup a site for users with dummy content, which they can later edit to meet their own needs.
WordPress 4.7 brings similar functionality to the WordPress core and themes. Themes can now automatically add starter content on fresh sites.
A user will need to just visit the theme customizer and the starter content will be displayed. However, this starter content will not be saved until a user clicks on the save button.
Safe to “do it”?
Well so far we have updated over 20 sites and not a glitch among them! So we are happy to roll this out, and enjoy the new benefits with a banana or 2!
