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WordPress 4.3 Release & New Features

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Happy August 18th! I’m sure you didn’t know that today was going to be such an exciting day when you woke up (unless you’re a WordPress junkie of course). WordPress version 4.3, code named “Billie,” was dropped today and it comes with a bunch of all new, supercharged features. So let’s take a look!

New Customizer Features & Options

I’m sure you all know and love the live theme customizer that WordPress introduced way back in version 3.4 – well, it just got better. There are new features as well as some old options that have all been relocated to the easy to use customizer.

Site Icon Option In The WordPress Customizer

site-icon-customizer

Site icons (or favicons as some of you may call them) have been added to their own “Site Identity” tab with the Customizer. Simple upload your image (512×512 pixels please) to be used as you website’s icon on tabs and when saved to mobile phone home screens. Oh, and your site title and tagline can be found here too now for easy peasy brand management.

Menus & Menu Locations In The WordPress Customizer

menu-customizer

Menus are a key part of any website – they are literally the way guests navigate your site. Well, now you can mange those from the Customizer too. They work just like the old menus section. Just click on the “Add Items” buttons to select posts, pages, categories, custom links and more to add to your menu. You can still drag & drop items to reorder and nest them for drop-downs.

New Stronger Passwords (by default)

stronger-passwords

Strong passwords are a key security necessity. We were stoked when WordPress 3.7 made it easier to see if you were using a strong password, but with the now creating your crazy password is even easier. Simply navigate to your user profile, scroll down to the password section and click the button to generate a new password. Ta-dah! A password you (and hackers) will never remember 🙂

Newly Enhanced Quick Edit Shortcuts

Sometimes you’re crunched for time… or maybe that’s all the time. To give you a helping hand, WordPress has integrated some pretty stellar shortcuts to speed up your content creation. For example, if you precede a line of text with ## like so:

quickedits-1

And then click enter, something magical happens. Your ## transforms that line of text into an H2 heading!

quickedits-2

Seriously, pure magic. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the new shortcuts to help your become a WordPress power user:

  • ## for H2 headings
  • ### for H3 headings
  • #### for H4 headings
  • ##### for H5 headings
  • ###### for H6 headings
  • * or – for bulleted lists
  • 1. or 1) for numbered lists
  • > for blockquotes

Comments On Pages Disabled

comments-off

Ok, let’s be honest, how many of your pages do you actually want people commenting on? Probably not many – you’d rather folks comment on your blog posts. Well now you don’t have to worry about that – comments and trackbacks/pingbacks are automatically disabled on new pages. If you want to enable them, simply check the box and save your page.

enable-discussion

Note: If for some reason you don’t see the “Discussion” metabox below your content, enable it by clicking on the “Screen Options” tab in the top right-hand corner of your screen and checking the box for Discussion.

New Edit Link On Posts & Pages

handy-edit-link

WordPress is all about being easy, so they’ve gone ahead and added an “Edit” link to posts and pages to make it easier for you to manage your time. This way, if a reader sends you a link to a typo you don’t have to search through all your posts to find the one you need. Just click on the “Edit” link to be instantly transported to that specific post’s back-end editor.

More New Stuff To Love

Not to sound like an infomercial, but wait – there’s more! Other improvements include tweaks to the admin appearance (for example header tags were updated), Singular.php was introduced as a new page template, there were a handful of updates to multisite, a bit of cleanup was done (old code for past versions of theme previous and distraction free writing were removed) and other changes for developers (like deprecation of PHP4-style constructors, get_transient() restrictions, API changes, etc).

Wrapping Up

I’m sure I missed something, so checkout the official WordPress release post and the WordPress 4.3 Core page to see what else was added. Let us know which features you’re stoked for, or the ones your not. Just leave a comment below!

wordpress-4-3-release
Article by Kyla WPExplorer.com staff
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1 comment

  1. Kaushal Patel

    It’s great to here about the new features in WordPress 4.3. There is no excuse why WordPress is first choice when we think about CMS. It’s great for SEO. It offers lots of free plugins. It’s easy to manage for non-technical person too.

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