What’s New in WordPress Version 4.7
Video Transcript
Hi. In this video, I’m gonna cover the changes or updates to the latest release from WordPress, that being 4.7.
Now, the most noticeable change, to me anyway, is the brand new default theme, that being 2017, and that’s what we’re looking at here. Has that kind of a parallax effect. But, to get a better look at this and a couple of the other changes to WordPress, let’s go under the dashboard area and go into our customizer which has a couple of editions to it with the new version. But we do get a chance to get a better look at the default 2017 theme here within the customizer because one of the other changes to version 4.7 is that it comes equipped with this pre-loaded theme content.
Now this is only on brand new installs or fresh installs. You will not see this content on the frontend, if it’s an update to version 4.7. This is not a fresh install, otherwise you would see this same stuff here on the frontend as we’re seeing in the customizer. Because all these images and the content stuff here, that’s part of the update. But in addition to that starter content, you also, within the customizer here, have the editor icons, which makes it a little easier for you to know what part of the theme you’re gonna be editing. For example, the header area, that’s this icon right here, and if you click on these icons it will open up over here on the left that particular section to be edited. Pretty simple, huh?
One of the other changes or additions is the header area, or the header media as it’s now called, because not only is it a header image that you can put in here, but now you can also put in a header video. Now this is theme specific, not all themes are going to be supporting the header video, but the new theme does. Now my suggestion is not to use this option here where you would be hosting the video on your server. My suggestion would be instead, have that video hosted on a YouTube account or a Vimeo account, where you can simply put the URL in here. It just sucks up less resources and less of a strain on your WordPress site, if you’re not having to stream the video that’s also hosted on your server. Now, let’s go and close this up.
So, in addition to the theme starter content, the editor icons, and the header media, we also have additional CSS. This option’s been added, which I think is also theme specific, but I’ve noticed that it does show up on all the default WordPress themes that I’ve tested on, anyway. And you do have to know CSS, but all you have to do is put in the CSS code that you want to adjust and you can see it live here on the customizer prior to you publishing it live for the entire world to see. Pretty cool.
So, that’s pretty much the new stuff related to the theme, and the customizer and there’s a couple of other things under the hood, but for the most part the noticeable stuff in addition to the theme and the customizer is also gonna be in the post and page editor. Let’s go ahead and check out the post editor here. And that is that they’ve rearranged things a bit, and they’ve removed the justification and the underlying icons. Now, if you happen to have the tiny MCE advanced plugin installed and activated, then you’re not gonna see those changes. But to give you an example, if they go back to a 4.6.1 version of WordPress, this is what the editor window looks like where the paragraph and H tags are on the second row, and here’s the underline and the justification icons which no longer exist. But if you were using the toggle toolbar, then you wouldn’t see that particular formatting tool.
Now, with 4.7 you do see that, and you also have these keyboard shortcut options available to you in the dropdown. And another item that’s been added or removed actually, I can display that for you here within the post editor page, and that is with images. Let’s go to add media, let’s go and select old Captain America here.
Now, this is one of those kind of behind the curtains deals that you may not have noticed, but in the versions of WordPress prior to 4.7, the alt text great idea for SEO Juice, and you should’ve been using it, and from now on you really should be using it.
But in the prior versions, WordPress, kind of behind the curtains if you will, would take the auto filled in title, because it grabs this information from the name of the image, and it would automatically put that in the alt text box in the coding. You wouldn’t see it here, but it would be in the coding, and that item here that would be in the coding, the behind the curtains stuff, that would be automatically overwritten as soon as you entered the alt text that you would put in here manually. The thing is though, that has now been removed. So, if you do not manually enter any alt text in here, then folks that rely on screen readers to be able to see what an image is, because maybe they’re visually impaired, they’re not gonna be able to see anything now because the alt text box is going to remain blank. Not sure why they did that, I’m sure they have their reasons, but my suggestion is from now on make sure to definitely spend an extra second or two and enter the alt text information.
In this example I would just put, “Captain America Image.” That way those that are using those screen readers would be able to tell that, “Oh, okay. This is an image of Captain America.” Now one of the items that I was looking forward to that has kinda been added, and that’s PDF thumbnails. If we come on back to our media… Where we at here? Media library. In the version 4.7 of WordPress, these are supposed to be image thumbnails now that are taken from the first page of the PDFs, and these would only be from PDFs that are uploaded into the media library after you’ve installed or updated WordPress 4.7.
The thing is though, the PDF thumbnail previewer only works if you have additional items installed on your server, which if you dig deep enough, which I had to do, you’ll come to this page here WordPress.org/support/topic/read-this-first-wordpress-4-7-master-list. And if you scroll down a ways, you’ll get to this section here that says, “Not a bug”. These are items that if you are not seeing these or you can’t get these particular features to work on your site, this tells you why. For example, “I don’t see PDF previews”, well, this tells you why. “Because you have to have this stuff installed on your server.” So yeah, you could probably just contact your web hosting service and have them install that and it would work for you. But it would be nice if they were to say something like that in the update information.
Which, by the way, you can learn more about that at make.wordpress.org/core. And here’s where you can find out about all the other items that have been added both noticeable and under the hood in the WordPress version 4.7 release.
And that’s gonna bring us to the end of this video on the update 4.7 of WordPress. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.