Quick video tour of all the new features in WordPress 4.3.
They include:
- Cut of for PHP4 support
- Strong passwords for new Users
- Comments turned off on pages
- Menu in the Customizer
- Easy Site Icon uploader
- Responsive table columns on admin pages
- Quick auto formatting for ordered/unordered lists, blockquote, and headings
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Hi,
I believe you are mistaken. WordPress did not “cut off” support for PHP4 what they did is deprecate additional PHP4 things, most prominently the PHP4 style class constructors.
Any code using PHP4 will still work but, depending upon if debugging is turned on or not, will display a deprecated warning message.
WordPress’ minimum version was changed in 2007 to 5.2.4 and has relatively recently upped that to, as you mentioned, 5.4 and they are testing it with the unreleased version 7 (currently it is working well).
Just wanted to correct the misconception.
David
Hi David, appreciate the distinction you made. However, when this many plugins and themes are breaking because of the change, I’d call that more than a warning.
I’m glad that WP is being careful not to jump too fast on the PHP version requirement, since so many hosts are slow to change their default version as well to help avoid massive breaks too.
Hi,
Yes, it is a large number but the list is of software that may have problems on some sites. It was created not by trying every single one of them but by having some software scan for particular code that could cause problems.
Also, remember that virtually every WordPress release breaks some things somewhere for some people :-)
Of course, if someone is having problems, particularly if they’re not very knowledgeable, then some of the deprecated things causing warning messages on their blogs are big things to them!
Fortunately, virtually all of the messages will disappear if DEBUG is turned off in the wp-config file (I’ve tried it on some as an experiment and it works well) and the issues are very easy to fix.
Obviously, removing/deactivating the offending theme, plug-in , widget would temporarily solve the “blog not working” problem although some desired/needed functionality may be lost.
David
I agree David, that every update causes some site owners problems. But, when I checked my sites and those of my clients against the plugins list that would be affected, we decided to wait for a bit. A couple of clients opted to change to other plugins. But there are a few on that list that there is no good substitute for, or it would be a ton of work to make the switch.
I’d rather just hold up and allow those devs to update the plugin, or give us time to prepare for a switch. There is no new function we need this minute.
Hi MaAnna,
I agree 100% that people should wait; I always wait a week or two unless it is a very serious update; it’s the smartest (and safest) way to do it even though not everyone does.
You probably also do what I do and apply updates to clones of the live site first to check for problems and then, if everything is okay or I know the fixes, apply it to the live site.
Anyway, the post was helpful to many people I am sure (and some I know about) and thanks for creating it.