WordPress 4.5 is announced to be released tomorrow at the 12th of April when everything goes well.
In this article i am going to show you what’s new in WordPress 4.5 including the new features and screenshots.
Visual Editor Inline Linking
A very cool and nice looking feature is inline linking which allows you to link with an inline toolbar without the distracting old link modal. The biggest advantage of this is that you are able to do some linking without removing the hands from keyboard and using the mouse. Type your text and press STRG+K (Mac: Cmd + K) and the new inline linking popup will be opened.
There are more shortcuts like `code` for code and **bold** for bold.
Theme Logo Support
WordPress 4.5 allows theme developers to add support for uploading a logo from the customizer panel. So its assumed shortly after releasing of WP 4.5 many developers will extend their themes to support this new features.
Themes can add customizer support for that feature with the code below:
add_image_size( 'twentysixteen-logo', 1200, 175 ); add_theme_support( 'site-logo', array( 'size' => 'twentysixteen-logo' ) );
Faster Live Preview (The Customizer)
The customizer won some performance improvements which results in faster live preview refreshing.
Better Image Performance
Images in WordPress 4.5 are compressed with a higher ratio. This leads to smaller file sizes and faster loading times. The compression algorithm is smart so that the increase in compression and loose of image quality is not visible for human visitors. The default quality changed from 90 to 82. This results in a noticeable reduction of file sizes with only little change in visual quality.
Easier Comments Moderation
The comments section faced some interface changes. So comment content is formatted for display, instead of one massive block of escaped text which was very confusing and unreadable before.
Before:
After:
Bug Fixing
More than 370 bugs were fixed in WordPress 4.5 so the code quality is (hopefully) better than before
jQuery Update
jQuery was updated from version 1.11.3 to 1.12.2
Conclusion
Most changes are under the hood with more than 370 fixed bugs and improvements for developer like additional hooks.
Some javascript libraries like jQuery and backbone were updated so it’s important that you test your website on WordPress 4.5 before you start the updating process.
If you are not using any staging site, yet it’s the best time to start now with it.
You can try out my free plugin WP Staging for doing so.
