I am a great fan of WordPress and today morning when I logged into my dashboard a pleasant surprise was already waiting for me. WordPress 3.4 it was and it has been released. I’ll say that you should not wait and update it right away! I did and I’ll be writing a few things about it in this post.
Live Theme Previews
First of all, there’s no new theme named Twenty Twelve. To be honest, there’s no new theme added by default. But both, Twenty Eleven and Twenty Ten has been updated to support the new “Theme Customizer”.
Yes there’s a new customization tool for themes but it looks like the theme has to updated with added support for the customization tool. Have a look in the below added video.
[youtube id=”Wgqb8oVi7SY” width=”600″ height=”340″ position=”center”]
But there’s one thing that bothers me. After customization when you save the theme, it will automatically activate the theme right away. It would have been good with an option to save the customization for later use. And yeah, an option to export the customization so that we can use it on another blog could have been great too. But lets see if the guys at Automattic are going to make this or not
Custom Headers
Twitter Embeds
I had to use a plugin to let a tweet appear in my posts. There was no inbuilt functionality in WordPress for this. I hate using plugins and I always try to find ways in which I can do stuff that a plugin does. Anyways, this is a great thing done by the devs at WordPress. This will now just require you to paste the tweet url and that’s it.
Take a look at the video below for a demo.
[youtube id=”lr9trJdUsKQ” width=”600″ height=”340″ position=”center”]
time to remove the twitter embedds plugin 😀
— Ujjwal Kumar (@xxCodeRxx) June 14, 2012
Better Captions
Before WordPress 3.4 it was not possible to add HTML in image captions but after the release of WordPress 3.4 it has become possible to add HTML in image captions. Check below for a demo.
Click here to go Home
That’s not all
- Faster WP_Query – Makes sites with big databases faster
- Better translations – WordPress translations to another languages have been made better
- New Theme’s API – This results is faster theme loading, persistent caching etc.
- New XML-RPC API
Overall
Yes definitely you should upgrade for the new features it gives. I love them. But WordPress still lacks some basic features I mentioned in the post. But come on, we have to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day.