The newest iteration of WordPress, the world’s greatest blogging platform*, has been released! Codenamed “Benny” in honor of Benny Goodman, WordPress 4.0 is all about “seamless, content-first publishing” according to a short video created to introduce the new software, which you can watch at the bottom of this post.
But what does that mean? Here are three (and a half?) of biggest changes that are being touted about “Benny” that would fall along these lines.
1) Intuitive Editing—Never Be Without Your Tools…Er Toolbar
One of the biggest drawbacks to WordPress, to me, has always been that it’s web-based software. (I know how dumb that sounds, let me finish.) What I mean by this is that WP always behaved like a webpage, which would include traditional web scrolling. This is so annoying and one of the biggest reasons—now that WP has an autosave feature—that I still don’t blog natively in WP. When I’m typing, I want my cursor to stay pretty much where it is while my page scrolls, like a typewriter, like every word-processing program I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to have to constantly interrupt my flow while I scroll back up. Needless to say, I was actually really exited when I saw that this problem had been corrected in “Benny”, so that your toolbar and publishing options moved with you as you typed.
1.5) Media Embedding—Hey, The Video Did Embed!
Why do I feel like WP has always had problems with video embedding? Oh, that’s right, because it has. Well, that’s quickly becoming a thing of the past, even more so now. Remember the terrible old days when we had to preview or publish a post before we would know if a video had embedded properly? Well, no more! Now, you can just toggle from the text to the visual editor! That’s it! If the link is valid and (for a video hosted somewhere else) the source is whitelisted, you’re good to go! And, while we discuss the whitelist, there have been some additions to that as well: CollegeHumor, Issu, Mixcloud, and TED. Now, the reason I’m not just calling this #2 is because it fits so perfectly between change #1 and…
2) Media Library—Look at all the Pretty Pictures!
Finally! The Media Library has truly needed a big update like this. Gone is the boring old list view, and in it’s place is a beautiful grid view that has all the cool kids buzzing. Not really. And the list view isn’t gone, really. If you like it, you can toggle back to it, but if you do, part of your soul just might die. Fortunately, even if that were true, your soul would be instantly restored when you realize that now, thanks to our good friend Benny, all you need to do to upload media is drag it into you library for an automatic upload! Oh yeah! One less click, people! This is the dream! But, wait! There’s more to this overhaul! You can actually move one upload to the next right after another, editing their meta data and the image itself before moving on to the next!
3) Adding Plugins
Finally—and I mean finally, blessed Lord—finding new plugins doesn’t have to start with a Google search. You can actually search for and research WP plugins from your WordPress dashboard. That’s it? Yep. That’s really a huge and long overdue improvement for adding plugins, which before felt like you all alone against a mountain (or near total dearth) of confusing, outdate, and unhelpful Google results.
So, there you go. WordPress 4.0/Benny is out in the wild! Update and enjoy—but make sure to backup your database first! You can read more about WP 4.0 at the link below.
What is your favorite update in “Benny”?
What features didn’t you get that you were hoping for?
[Images and video via WordPress.org]
*Slightly biased
Jason D. says
Since the post editor is the tool I use the most I am loving all the changes they made to make it easier (especially the scrolling!)
Phil Schneider says
Jason, did the improved scrolling work for you? For whatever reason, it’s not working for me. (Could be a plugin issue. I already tested and proved my theme innocent.)
Eric Dye says
As am I!
Phil Schneider says
🙂