What’s New in WordPress Version 4.9

Video Transcript

This class is gonna cover the changes in the latest WordPress version, 4.9. Now, once you upgrade from an earlier version of WordPress to version 4.9, there’s an About page that covers some of the goodies that have been added with this new version. That’s under the What’s New tab. As you can see, there’s a lot going on here.

I’ll begin this demonstration with the enhancements to the Customizer. Now under this installation, which has CXI2 up here, that’s the name of the site. This is the one that has the new version, 4.9. The other one here, 4.8.1 … Both of these by the way are local hosted websites on my computer, not live websites, which is important here when I get to the demonstration for the code enhancements, and for that I’ve got a live hosted site down here. But the one that has 4.8.1, that’s an older version. The one that has CXI2, that’s the newer version. This is gonna allow me to show you comparisons of what was and what is.

First off, let’s do the Customizer comparison. Go to the Appearance, click on Customize. Again, this is the new version. Go to the older version, Appearance, Customize. The first thing I wanna show you on the new version is a very cool addition that allows you to not just publish any edits, but also save as a draft, and even schedule it. Let me show you. Just gonna make a quick edit here, just add a number two at the end of the title. You can see right up here in the top, I’ve got the ability to publish, and I’ve got this little gear icon.

But before I click on that and show you that, let’s go to the older version and do the same thing. Click here, add the number two to the title, you can see like it is right there. But here in the older version, we only have save and publish. The newer version though, clicking on this icon, you get this extra fly out that allows you to not just publish, but you can also save as a draft. You can make whatever edits you want, save it as a draft, come back later and finish up.

But even better is you can schedule it for some future date. Let’s say for example that you’ve got a sale taking place, and you don’t wanna have to get up at midnight whenever your sale starts to make any edits. You make those edits now, schedule this to take place or to self-publish at midnight, and boom, it’s done. Then once it’s published, you come back in here and make your edits to the way you want it to look at the end of the sale. Schedule this so that at the end of the sale, it’s automatically changed for your and self-published. How cool is that?

In addition to these, you also have this preview link that you can share whatever edits you’ve made without granting admin access to somebody else. Once you make your changes and you save, you get this link right down here. Hand that out to anybody that you wanna show this stuff off to and you’re good to go. That’s pretty cool.

Now we’re gonna come on back here and discard these changes. Now I wanna show you the theme section, this is pretty cool too. Let’s come on back to the old version first and get out of here.
Let’s say you wanna change the theme, we get the display right here of all the existing themes that are already installed on our site. But on the new version, we do the same thing, change theme; We get this that shows us all of those themes that we’ve got installed, but also we can even select from the themes from wordpress.org, all within the Customizer.

Also working with menus from within the Customizer has just gotten easier. There’s more instructions to help manage your menus throughout the new version of the Customizer. For us forgetful folks, if we forget to save any of the changes from within the Customizer, no problem. The next time you come back, you’re presented with the option to restore from that auto save, kinda like it is with the posts and the pages. I also read somewhere that they’re wanting to add revisions to the Customizer, just like they’ve got with the posts and the pages, but I’m not really sure if or when that’s gonna happen. That’s a look at the Customizer. Let’s go ahead and close up our older version of the Customizer and the newer version of the Customizer.

Now let’s check out some of the new stuff with the widgets. We’ve got a brand new widget called the gallery widget. Just like it sounds, it allows us to do the same thing in the widget area, that is add image galleries, as we could in our posts and pages. You can also add short codes to the text widgets without having to add additional codes or plugins, all that stuff is built in now. I wanna show you on the old text widget. But if we open this up here, this is the older text widget. This is the new text widget, we can add media right from within our widget area. This is pretty cool too. Prior to this version, prior to version 4.9, you could only add URLs to YouTube and Vimeo videos without adding more stuff. But now, you can add more video types than just those from YouTube and Vimeo, like maybe some of those cat videos you see on Facebook.

Matter of fact, let me show you. I’ve got a URL here that I got off a Facebook post of a dog and cat having fun with one another, so let me go in and just copy this. You can paste this in either the visual or the text tab, but I’m just gonna leave it in the visual tab here. Control V and there it is. If we go ahead and save this and come on over to our site, and there it is. Again, that’s the Facebook URL. By the way, that’s not just in the widget area, but that’s also in the post and pages.

Oh yeah, and to finish up with the widgets, WordPress has added a program called Codemirror, and that’s these guys right here. They’ve integrated this program into the core files, which is part of that code enhancement that I was referring to earlier. If you come on back here to the new version of WordPress – let’s go ahead and close this up here – and go to the custom HTML. Let me show you first the old custom HTML right here, okay. Not much too that, not much flare or flash. Let me just copy this for demonstration purposes and go to the new version of WordPress. Here’s the custom HTML in the new version. Paste that code in here and you can see it’s colorized. Pretty cool.

It also gives you warnings whenever there’s a potential issue with the code that you’ve put in here. There’s all kinds of cool stuff that Codemirror has added to our WordPress coding enhancements.

Not just these errors, but also if we go to the theme or plugin editors … This already has been upgraded to 4.9. If we make a mistake in here – let’s say we just delete that – we get the error message over here.

This is gonna help prevent those white screen of deaths or prevent us from breaking out site whenever we’re tinkering in the code. If you see this, you know that something just happened. As you can see there, it also does the auto fill. ‘Cause I don’t need both of those I’ve got the closing bracket right there.

Another code enhancement item is that before you are even allowed into the theme or plugin editor, you get a little popup notice warning you of what you’re about to do. You have to click on an “I Understand” button before it lets you in. That’s pretty much it for the Customizer, the widgets, and the code enhancements. Oh wait, there’s one last thing I wanna mention as far as the code enhancement, and that takes us back to the Customizer. Let’s go ahead and close this out here, come on back to the Customizer. As a result of the Codemirror being added, we’ve got the additional CSS. Well we had that in the prior version, let’s go on back to the Customizer. See we’ve got that in the old version, 4.8.1.

But when we click on this, you can see it’s bland. Pretty much like with the custom HTML widget, you have to know what you’re doing. There’s no colorization, no auto fill or any of that stuff with the old version. But with the new version, see it gives a little bit of a writeup here as to what’s taken place. Right down here is where we can add our additional CSS. It will alert us to problems, just like with the custom HTML widget. It will help auto fill some of the coding, which helps speed up the entry of the code. Again, this is all if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing in writing code, then just leave this part alone. But just know that if you do have a developer itch, that this code enhancement through Codemirror being added is a big plus for you.

Well, that’s gonna bring us to the end of this class on what’s new in version 4.9 of WordPress. Thanks for checking it out, and you have a great day.