WordPress 3.4: The New And Exiting Features

On June 13, 2012, WordPress Version 3.4, named for guitarist Grant Green, was released to the public. For those of you who did not click the one-click upgrade button just yet, please make sure that you upgrade. In this article, i will highlighting what’s new in WordPress 3.4 in terms of features for users and developers. This new release offers you some cool features like tweaking your theme and being able to preview those changes before committing to them, changing your blogsites’ header and a really simple way to add tweets to your posts.

Live Preview and Theme Customizer

The theme customizer is one of the most outstanding features in WordPress 3.4. Handy for both users and developers alike, the theme customizer will start a new era of WordPress theme development. In the past, users would never know whether a specific theme would work for their website without activating it. They would not know how the theme would look with their content. Well that problem is out the sack now with the Live Preview and Theme Customizer. When you go to Appearence » Themes, you will see “Live Preview” below each theme.

Live Theme Preview – WordPress 3.4

When you click that link, a live preview will open with the Theme Customizer. For active themes, there will be a link named Customize that you can click which will open the live preview.

Now you can make changes to your theme, or try out a new theme, play around with it and then decide if you want to make these changes public. There are many options to “play” with. They will change based on the theme you are working on but here are a list of some of the options I have seen:

Once you are ready to make your changes “live” click “Save & Publish” or click “Cancel” if you aren’t ready for any changes yet.

Easy Tweets Embed with oEmbed

In the past, you would have to use a plugin to embed a tweet in WordPress posts. Well not anymore. Just like youtube videos, now all you have to do is add the link to your tweet in a separate line. WordPress will embed the tweet with reply, retweet, favorite, and follow features. Love it. Check the example below:

Custom Header

In WordPress 3.0, WordPress added the ability add custom header images. Well, all the header images had to be a specific width and height. If you decided to change things around, it would cause things to look weird. In WordPress 3.4, you can now have flexible headers. You can see the new code in the Codex.

Aside from that, you can now add custom header and background images from the Media Library as well.

Better Organization for Page Templates

If you ever worked on a complex site, you will find yourself creating a lot of custom page templates. Up until now, all page template files had to stay inside the theme folder along with all other files. This can get really clunky. For the sake of organization, you can now have a /pages/ sub-directory in your theme’s folder where you can place all page templates. Starting in WordPress 3.4, WordPress will identify all page templates in the theme folder or in any sub-directory of a theme folder.

We know this will be extremely handy for our theme.

Other Improvements

There were a lot of bug fixes and improvements. Below is a list of items that we found to be very useful.

WordPress will now redirect attempts to visit /login, /dashboard, or /admin to the appropriate WordPress pages. Now you don’t need a plugin anymore

We would love to hear what are your favorite features in WordPress 3.4