Changes in WordPress 3.9 you should know about

Ernest Marcinko Blog 1 Comment

Widgets

One of the nicest changes are widget customizability. I’m still missing conditional tags like: don’t show the widget on certain pages and similar. It’s still nice to see an update on the widget interface. Key changes:

  • Live preview of the widget changes! – Honestly, the best change ever. Now we can all test the changes on the production environment!
  • Adding widgets to multiple widgetized areas – nice to have this as well!

wp39widgets

Visual Editor

The drag&drop image upload is finally here! All you need to do is drag and drop an image into the post visual editor area and the media uploader will automatically start. This isn’t however the only change:

  • Visual editor drag and drop mode
  • TinyMCE updated to version 4.0 – this is very nice, however you might want to check your plugins if you are using the old version of the editor!

Changes for developers

There are four new utility functions, namely:

  • doing_action() – you can check if the current flow is inside an action hook
  • doing_filter() – you can check if the current flow is in a filter hook
  • has_image_size() and remove_image_size() – for image manipulations

Also, few of the javascript libraries had been updated: jQuery, TinyMCE, Plupload

HTML5 galleries and captions were also introduced in this version. You can add the following lines to your themes functions.php to enable it:

add_theme_support( 'html5', array( 'gallery', 'caption' ) );

Don’t forget to test your plugins with the new WordPress version before updating them in the repository – especially if you used TinyMCE or many jQuery plugins.

Comments 1

  1. Patrick

    The new editor.. It’s lovely. it really is, I’ve used it a fair bit now, and remembering back to the WP 2.0 days, it really has progressed leaps and bounds.

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