WordPress 3.4 – Going ‘Green’

Unless you live in a remote cave or have been on an extended vacation on Mars, you probably know that WordPress 3.4, also known as ‘Green,’ was released last week. A lot of under-the-hood work has made it faster and better, but  WordPress users are talking about a few cool features in particular.

Uncluttered Theme Directory

Now, when you view your themes, or even if you are searching via your dashboard, you  see that the details of each theme are not cluttering the page.  You choose to see them only by clicking on “details.”This is more aesthetic than anything, but it also makes searching for and finding themes much easier.

Theme Customizer and Live Preview

The Theme Customizer is probably the coolest new feature. The Live Preview is pretty sweet as well.

In the past, you never knew if a certain theme would work for your existing site. Now, when you click on it, the theme customizer opens and gives you the chance not only to see what it would look like, but how it might look with some customizations like, for example, a  color change.

Also, the theme customizer works great with your active theme. Before, if you wanted to change a header, color, etc., you had to make the change and then view it live. Now, with the theme customizer, you can preview those changes before actually saving them and going live. And I have the feeling that theme developers are going to take even more advantage of these options.

Easy Tweets Embed with oEmbed

Before, you needed a plugin to embed tweets into a post or page. Now you can do it easily by just pasting in the tweet URL. As you see below, not only does this give you the tweet, but embeds with reply, retweet, and follow features. I must admit, I really like this and am already discovering opportunities to use tweets in blog posts.

An In-Depth Video Review of WordPress 3.4 Major Features bobwp.com/an-in-depth-vi…

— Bob Dunn (@bobWP) June 18, 2012

Links in Image Captions

In previous versions, you couldn’t add a link in a caption. For example, you may have wanted to link to the photographer, or perhaps, a related website. Now you can. But you will need to put HTML markup in the caption. For example, in this image:

The caption would look like this in your media editor window.

<a title=”Grand Central Station NYC” href=”http://www.grandcentralterminal.com/” target=”_blank”>Grand Central Station</a>

Other Good Stuff

Lastly, there are custom header improvements. In the past when inserting a custom header, it had to be an exactly height and width. This new feature allows for more flexible headers. Also, you are not limited to uploading custom headers and backgrounds. You can now add them from your media library.

As I mentioned before, there are other improvements that only the hard core geek or developer would get a rush from. But they are there, and that’s good for users.

If you would like to see some of these features I have mentioned in action, pop over to the video at BobWP and check them out.

So, update, but remember, (let’s say it all together): “Back up before you do!”