What’s New in WordPress Version 4.5

Video Transcript

A new version of WordPress, version 4.5, is a major update to the popular website builder software. In this video, I’m gonna cover some of the more noticeable changes and additions within WordPress version 4.5. Now, I say noticeable because a lot of the changes are under the hood, so to speak, in that they deal with the tweaking of the code to make things run faster and more securely.

Let’s go ahead and login to our admin section of our WordPress site and check some these new things out. Now, I’ve already done that here on this tab. And what we wanna do now is come over here to the left menu and hover over appearance and in the fly up, click on customize. And one of the first additions or changes I wanna point out is down here at the bottom. You’ve got these three icons. These are what’s called the ‘Responsive Preview’.

And over here on the right side of the preview window, by default the ‘Desktop Preview’ is what’s selected. And this is what your site will look like on a desktop. And the next tab over, this is what your site will look like on a tablet setup. This prevents you from having to download additional software or make any changes to your browser to see what it looks like. You can do it all from within your WordPress site’s customizer section of your admin area. And the last icon here is for smartphone. Awesome.

Now, the next addition or change is theme specific. If we come up here to site identity, we’ve got logo support. Now, I say theme specific because not all themes right now are setup for logo support. But if yours is, it’s pretty simply just click on ‘Select Logo’. It brings you to your media library where you can either select an image from your media library or upload one from your desktop. And they give you the suggested image dimensions right here. It’s a 150 pixels by a 150 square. Just add your logo if you like, and let me get out of here, that’s gonna show up right above your site title. If you wanna include both, make sure that box here is checked saying, ‘Display Site Title and Tagline’. Otherwise, you can uncheck this and just have your logo showing up there instead. Totally up to you. Personal preference.

So we can get on out of here, and leave page. The next change I wanna point out is in the WYSIWYG or “what you see is what you get” editor, and this holds true for both the post editor and the pages editor. If we go into post, go ‘Add New’, skim through on a demonstration title, and some demonstration text. And what I wanna do now is highlight a word or a phrase and come on up here to the format bar and click on ‘insert or edit link’. And now you’ve got this in line link editor, pretty much the same functions, not too hard to figure out how to use it. You just, as it says here, “Paste in your URL or type to search.” If you wanna link to internal pages or posts, like say that default sample page, it’s that simple. And then just click on the apply button here, and it automatically sets it to that URL.

And the other items are a few brand new keyboard shortcuts. If you wrap your text with a single asterisk, that’s gonna italicize it. Double asterisks will bold it. And if you wrap your text with single quotations, that’s gonna change it into code formatting. And if you wanna see what is currently all the keyboard shortcuts, head on over to codex.wordpress.org/Keyboard_Shortcuts, and don’t forget the capitalization there.

And one more item I wanna mention while we’re in the editor here is another oEmbed is being supported. And that’s with Twitter Moments. It’s just like embedding a YouTube video URL. If you go to YouTube and grab the URL and just paste it in your editor, and it’s automatically gonna populate or replace that URL with the actual video. Same thing with Twitter Moments. If you go to Twitter Moments and grab the Twitter Moments URL like I’ve done right here, and come on back to your editor and just paste it in there, it automatically replaces that URL with that Twitter Moments. Let me go ahead and publish that and I’ll show you what it looks like. And then view post. And you can see this is that Twitter Moments, pretty awesome, just by grabbing the URL and putting it in your editor.

Now, a couple of other changes or additions to version 4.5 deals with comment moderation. Some enhancements to the email notification messages that you receive whenever a comment is created on your site and is awaiting moderation. Of course, if you have all your comments turned off, then you’re not gonna get this or really care much about this particular addition or change. But if you do, then you’re gonna notice some pretty cool changes in those emails you’re gonna be getting.

And the last item I’m gonna touch on is that with version 4.5 of WordPress, it’s doing a much better and faster job of compressing image files while not degrading the quality. And the end result of that is it’s gonna make your image-heavy posts and pages load even faster.

Well, that’s gonna bring us to the end of this video on What’s New in WordPress version 4.5. Thanks for watching, and you have a great day.