The Small Business Website Guy

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WordPress 3.9 Released Today

Named for the great jazz organist Jimmy Smith, WordPress 3.9 was released today. Mere days after the brouhaha over Heartbleed and two emergency patches, the new version of WordPress hit the streets pretty much on schedule. Some of the new features are listed below.

Clients in my Website Management Program will not see an update to WP 3.9 immediately. It is my normal policy to wait for the first patch release which typically occurs within a few weeks after the initial release. As with all major software releases, despite the best efforts of beta testers and developers, bugs are to be expected and I’m content to let the pioneers get the arrows in their chests.

This release has some changes that affect a number of existing plugins which is yet another reason to wait for the dust to settle before upgrading. The track record of plugin developers with WordPress 3.8 was not great. Many of them seemed to wait a while after the initial release to update their software despite the beta and release candidate versions having been available for some time prior to the release.

WordPress sent out emails to all the developers who have plugins and themes in the respective repositories recommending that they test their software against the new version and make sure there were no issues. This is a huge step in the right direction and welcomed by many plugin developers.

Improved Visual Editing

It remains to be seen how much improvement has taken place, but one of the big features of WordPress 3.9 is a series of improvements to the visual editor. Among other things the “Paste from Word” button goes away and it will now be possible to paste directly into the editor from Word without ending up with a muddled mess. Speed improvements and mobile support are also in the feature list.

Improved Image Editing

Images are much easier to edit within the editor due to better accessibility of the various editing tools. Images can be scaled (resized) directly in the editor now, as well.

Drag and Drop Images

Images can now be dragged and dropped directly into the editor instead of having to upload them to the Media Library first. This eliminates several steps and will make creation of posts and pages much quicker.

Gallery Previews

Galleries now show in the visual editor just as they will in the final post. No need to preview the post to see what the gallery will look like.

Audio and Video Playlists

Previous versions of WordPress allowed direct embedding of audio and video files. WordPress 3.9 takes it a step further and allows simple playlists so that there is only one player on the page.

Widget and Header Previews

In previous versions, widgets were a bit of an adventure in that you had to preview the site to see what the widgets actually looked like once they were dropped into place. Now, widgets and headers can be arranged, added, and edited in the theme customizer and previewed in real time before saving.

Theme Browser

Browsing through the WordPress theme repository just got a lot better with the ability to preview the themes without having to install them first.

Ever Closer to WYSIWYG

While we’re not there yet, the WordPress development team has moved a big step closer to having a true WYSIWYG experience when creating content in WordPress. The editor has long been a sore point for many and these improvements should ease a lot of that pain.

Check out the video below for a quick rundown of the new features:

John Sawyer

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Comments

  1. Thanks, John, for always keeping us up to date. These seem to be substantive changes to WP, and not just incremental ones. Of course, that means more might go wrong, but hopefully they will get the glitches worked out before you update everyone.

    • Hi, Jeannette, that’s the idea behind waiting for the first patch. 🙂 No doubt there will be some glitches. IMO, it’s better to wait a bit for those to be worked out before jumping into a new version. While the new features are great, there aren’t any we can’t live without for a couple of weeks until the first patch release.

  2. John, this sounds great – I have been wishing for many of these features (and you know how I feel about the WordPress editor). Hope 3.9 lives up to expectations. Thanks for the preview.

    • Hi, Andrea, you’re certainly not alone! I rarely use the Visual editor because it’s much easier for me to edit in Text mode, but I understand why that’s not an option for the majority of WP users. Improvements have been long overdue and these will be welcome, I’m sure.

  3. John,

    I’m pretty jazzed (it fits with 3.9) about these new changes adding flexibility to editing and publishing. Don’t know how many versions of the post I go through, going back and forth, before getting it just right in all versions including 3.8. I hope this new version goes smoothly. Looking forward to using it on all of my sites, old and new.

    • Hi, Babette, yes, many of the changes are way overdue. It’s always been a mystery to me why the WP editor was so bad, especially the Visual editor. It will be interesting to see how much of a leap forward this new version is.

  4. Please add me to your list of folks who appreciate your watching out for us and our sites.

  5. Thanks for the update, John. Every one of these changes sounds like an improvement. Less time needed to “correct” a post before publishing is a solid step forward.