WordPress 4.9 Tipton – New things to get excited about

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Hi, couple of days ago, WordPress releases its new version which is the WordPress 4.9 Tipton. Along with that are the enhancements on the WordPress core itself. Being an owner of a website or at least working on a website that uses WordPress, here are the things that might affect your or might help you going forward in doing your business:

Customizer

Wordpress 4.9 Tipton customizers

The first major enhancement was on the customizer. This customizer only applies if you are using a theme that supports the customizer. If you’re using some sort of a framework or a custom theme, then more than likely this will not affect you. But in anyway your theme supports that, then this is how the new version affects you.

The first one is we’re gonna edit the header.  I’m just gonna hide that image right there. Now I just can click the button and save it as a draft or even schedule that to go live on a certain date and time. Let’s just save it as a draft.

Then the next feature is the link which is really handy. Basically this is a custom link that you may want to send to your client or to a friend who might want to see the changes first before it goes live. So its gonna like a sandbox or some sort of development server. Wherein you can tweak on all the changes without really affecting the front end of the website. That’s really handy and I love that one!

Design Locking Mechanism

The other thing is the design locking mechanism on this new release. So it’s like if I’m editing this page then another developer might be log in as well. He might want to edit this page, but since I already open this for editing then he cannot do that editing. Because it’s already open right on my end. So its kinda like post locking mechanism, wherein you’re editing a post and somebody needs to edit that post as well. WordPress would not allow that simultaneously.

WordPress Editor

Then the last one is, let’s say I leave this workstation. And then after an hour or two I go back and suddenly WordPress will remind me to do any save changes something like that. It’s also handy. On the back end side of the WordPress, we have some new cool stuffs thats going on.

Let’s go in the editor, as you would notice there are some sort of syntax highlighting already. Now you can easily read the codes and probably do some little changes. Let’s say I’m gonna edit something. It will warn me there is an error to be fix. You cannot save any changes when there is an error in your code. That means you will not encounter that white screen again. Suddenly you’re working on the functions .php and you copy and paste some code from the internet. Just hit update the file and suddenly your site is dead. So it will not happen anymore because what it does is it will check the code first. And then it will warn you, you can’t save that, you need to fix that error, from there you can just hit save changes.

So really, WordPress 4.9 Tipton brings assurance that the owner of the website will not accidentally kill his own website.

Warning Sign

And then another great feature of WordPress 4.9 Tipton is the warning sign. Since I already open this and probably on your end the first time you open your editor, WordPress will warn you that you should not be editing files on this place, unless you know what your doing. I believe that’s a good idea to have a little piece of warning at least to lessen some potential danger. If your site has multiple accounts that has multiple administrators. That’s a good way to handle that.

New Widgets

And then on the widgets area, there are couple of new widgets. The first one is the gallery. Right within the widgets area you can easily select and then create your own gallery. It doesn’t stop there, you got the full control of the gallery just like what you would do on post or a page.

 

The other one is the basic text widget. Now it has this add media button, so you’re not limited to just text, you can add images, videos or audios right within your text. You can even format that just like you would on a normal post or a page.

 

WordPress 4.9 Tipton: Site Building Improvements

And then some other cool stuffs, little things, some sort of better handling on the themes switching. When you switch to a new theme, you will be able to preview that better and then test that theme first before really going live. And then on the menu, some enhancement, not really big, but help you in better menu creation experience. Because before it’s a little bit annoying creating menu especially when the menu gets massive.

Okay, that’s on the non- developer side of things, but if you’re a developer, then rejoice you got some cool stuffs going on, the customizers js, a lot of improvement, the media element js. I love that, especially when working on the media elements and really massive thing right here is WordPress removes the dependency on jquery. So less conflict the better.

Code Mirror

And then one big thing is the code mirror, which is now back within WordPress course. If you’re a plugin developer then this is really some sort of good stuff. This is also where it might break a lot of websites during this update, because a lot of plugins are using the code mirror that might be being used by a lot of plugins. If these plugins did not register the library properly then it might break your website. So my guess is wait a little bit and let the plugin developer do their own updates. Update the plugin and update the WordPress itself.

And then some sort of changes in the roles and capabilities. That’s how WordPress 4.9 Tipton works. I believe this is really a great update. I was waiting for a couple of these things from the core itself. And I’m really happy that they did it right now.
Okay hope that helps, if you got a couple of questions just let me know in the comments section below. Thanks!

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