WordPress 3.4 is here. What’s WordPress? It’s the blogging platform that powers Craving Tech and also millions of other blogs out there in the blogosphere.
The latest update, WordPress 3.4, adds a few extra features for new bloggers who are still trying to tweak their themes and layouts, and also some improvements on posting.
So, what’s new in WordPress 3.4 again?
WordPress 3.4 – Theme Customizer
The new theme customiser
From now on, there is a new “Customize” link whenever you go to your WordPress’ Appeareance menu (where your WordPress themes are). You can also do a “Live Preview” and change some theme settings (such as Header text, link colors, etc), assuming the theme supports it. The Thesis theme that I’m using here at Craving Tech does not support this (we have to tweak the CSS files ourselves), but the default WordPress theme does:
It’s a great addition if you are looking to overhaul your blog’s layout or to try out new themes without having to install a plugin separately.
WordPress 3.4 – embed Twitter tweets to post natively
A cool feature that most bloggers will love is the ability to copy paste a tweet link into your post which will be converted into a nicely layout format by WordPress. For example, if I copy paste a tweet of mine here, it’ll be displayed as:
You can even reply, favorite, follow, and retweet directly from the “widget”. If your tweet has a photo link on it, the photo will be displayed as well:
Cool, eh? I don’t normally post my tweets into a blog post but I know some bloggers who do. I’m sure they’ll love this better than attaching a screenshot of the tweet.
WordPress 3.4 – HTML in image captions
You can now format your image captions, thanks to the new HTML support in image captions (bold, italic, add URL link, etc):
It is now easier if you want to credit a photo you took from Flickr, or to link to your current blog post.
Those are the highlighted main features/changes in WordPress 3.4. Others are pretty minor and probably non-noticeable by you (such as a slight performance increase), although plug-in developers will love some new calls and changes behind the hood.
As always, there is no reason not to update your WordPress to the latest. So far, all WordPress plugins that I’m using work as intended in WordPress 3.4, no issues at all.
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