It's that time of the year again. No, I'm not talking about Christmas, I'm talking about another WordPress release. WordPress Version 4.1, named “Dinah” in honor of jazz singer Dinah Washington, shipped last week. You can download it from WordPress.org or simply update in your WordPress dashboard. With each new version of WordPress, I also update the Easy WP Guide. As usual, this updated version covers all the new features and changes that came with the latest version.
One of the exciting new features that WordPress 4.1 brings along, is a new default theme, Twenty Fifteen. Twenty Fifteen is a blog focused theme, with an emphasis on clarity and readability. It uses Google’s Noto font family which aims to support all the world’s languages, meaning it's ideal for languages with non-latin alphabets.
Distraction Free Writing has been improved, when editing your content. Now, when Distraction Free Writing is turned on, your menu and side panels fade away, leaving you to focus on what's important. Your content. When you want to use your tools again, simply move the cursor outside of the Visual Editor and everything returns.
If you're one of the (roughly) 45% of people who use non-english web content, you'll be pleased to know that it's now even easier to change the language in your WordPress Dashboard. You can switch to over forty different languages using the Site Language dropdown on the General Settings page.
With WordPress 4.1, embedding videos from Vine is as simple as pasting a URL onto its own line in a page or post.
The Plugin installer now also provides plugin recommendations. These are based on the plugins that are currently installed.
As with most WordPress updates, there's also a lot of improvements behind the scenes. Metadata, date, and term queries have been improved, along with improvements in the Customizer API.
Along with all the new features added into this new version of the Guide, I've also tweaked a number of chapters to improve the language and make it that bit easier to read. There's also a few places in the Dashboard where screens have changed ever so slightly, so those screenshots have been updated in the guide as well, to make sure it reflects these changes.
If you haven't done it already, make sure you click that update button in your Dashboard to get the latest and greatest version of WordPress. As with any site updates though, it's also wise to perform a site backup first, just in the unlikely event that you encounter some issues.
So, head on over to the download page to download the latest version of the Easy WP Guide, or if you want to get stuck straight into it, read it online. The ePub & Mobipocket versions in the Apple iBookstore, B&N Nook Books Store and the Amazon Kindle store will also get updated, but it’ll take a week of so for those to appear. I’ll update the links to those new mobile optimised versions as they become available.
Happy holidays everyone! Whatever you celebrate at this time of the year, stay safe and have fun!
See you in 2015.
