What’s New in WordPress 4.9

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See all the new features in WordPress 4.9, including several Widget and Customizer improvements that you’ll really like.

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Video Transcript

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New Gallery Widget

WordPress already natively supports a lovely gallery feature. And now version 4.9 allows you to place galleries in widgets. It’s a super way to draw interest to more of your posts.

Here are a few ideas:

Top post images
Category post images
Seasonal images

And, this new widget can also be used as a temporary way to create a collage for a single snapshot of thumbnails to interest folks into following you on your social media accounts like Pinterest and Instagram. That’s far better than using their widgets or code to bring that info into your site, which dramatically slows down your page load time.

Watch: 5 Ways to Create Image Widgets That Won’t Slow Down Your Site for super ideas on ways to use all the image widgets that WordPress now supports.

Text Widget Improvements

It used to be that you had to create your own code for text widgets. And adding images was a real pain.

Not anymore!

The lowly little ole Text widget is getting some more love in the last two WordPress updates.

First they added a rich text editor.

New Media Button

A new Add Media button has been added in 4.9 now too. So it’s easy to add an image and a text link.

So, if you’ve been using a plugin to get all these features, consider dropping it in favor of the widgets natively supported by WordPress now.

Shortcode Support

The Text Widget will also now natively support shortcodes. So, if you’ve been using a plugin to help with that, consider dropping it as well.

You’ll still want to use the new Custom HTML Widget for straight out code and scripts, like for displaying ads that are provided by an outside source. If you haven’t updated your Text Widgets for that, now is the time to put it on your to do list.

Video Widget Expands Support

When first introduced, the Video Widget natively supported YouTube and Vimeo embeds. The list has now been expanded to include support for all oEmbeds providers. That list includes a whale of a lot more than just videos too.

What’s odd about the new widgets is that this oEmbed support is included in the Text Widget as well. So, that makes it a better candidate than the video widget if you want to add text and links as well.

New Saved Button

When you save changes in a widget, the button will now display Saved, to indicate the change is complete and successful.

Customizer Improvements

See all the new features in the Customizer.

Save Theme Changes as Draft

Several new features have been added to the Customizer for themes.

You can now save your tweaks as a Draft.

You can even share that Draft with others. It has a live URL that you can share.

And, you can schedule the changes to go live at a later time.

Now, if that last new feature doesn’t make sense, keep in mind that all of the Customizer changes are in preparation for the revolution that will start with the new Gutenberg text editor too.

Improved Theme Browsing

In know most of you use Genesis or other premium frameworks, so this may not be of interest to you. But the theme browsing experience has been improved in the Customizer too.

Improved Menu Creation

The flow to create and edit your navigation menu has been improved in WordPress 4.9 as well.

As you can see with these changes, the emphasis has been to revamp the Customizer interface for ease and to include more functions. This is a precursor to even bigger changes that are coming next year for WordPress as it incorporates more theme and page builder functions.

Better Widget Mapping

When you change themes, the widgets and menus freak out because they don’t know where to display in the new theme, mainly due to changes in the widget names.

WordPress 4.9 features a more intelligent map and can make a better guess as to where the widgets and menus will display in the new theme.

Improved Code Editor

For those who like to tweak the theme code directly, you’ll enjoy the new code editor in WordPress 4.9. It’s called CodeMirror.

You’ll easily be able to tweak your CSS, theme and plugin code, and code in the Custom HTML widget.

WordPress will now also auto-detect fatal errors in your code. You will not be able to save the change, and a warning message will appear with details, which is super helpful.

The new editor also:

Auto completions as you type
Makes code suggestions as you type
User profile
Has a syntax highlighter – which can also be turned off in your User profile settings.

Core Code Removal

A few items are coming out of WordPress core with version 4.9 too, including some that may directly impact your video and other media files.

PressThis has been removed from the Tools section. It was a bookmarklet that hardly anyone used. If you have plugins or such that depend on it, or if you did you use it, you can reinstall it as a plugin now.

SWFUpload Library will be removed from core. This will impact any Flash media you have, such as videos. And honestly, if you’re still using Flash, you’re way behind the times as browser and device support for them has dropped dramatically. Definitely consider rendering those videos as .mp4s.

MediaElement will have all jQuery dependencies removed from core. Instead, YouTube and Vimeo embeds will pull directly from the API. This change was required to allow the Video Widget to support all oEmbed providers, instead of just the 2 that MediaElement supports, which are YouTube and Vimeo.

So, if you use a player for video or audio files, be sure to check for updates on it to ensure it will work with WordPress 4.9. Or, perhaps consider trying a direct link that is supported by oEmbed, which has been native to WordPress for some time.

JetPack removed some of its functionality that will now be supported in core. Specifically, the Gallery Widget and Syntax Highlighting features have been removed. So, if you used either of those via JetPack, ensure they are still working after you update.

More Improvements

There are a few new additions for Users in 4.9 too.

User Role

WordPress 4.9 tweaked the different User role capabilities. You can now limit activate/deactivate of plugins to only certain users, like admins, as well as who can change the language files and translations.

Email Change Confirmation

This may be super important to sites with direct subscribers, such as member sites and stores.

Once a User registers, they can go into their profile and change their email address.

Now admins can turn on a feature to send a confirmation email before the change becomes permanent. The confirmation is sent to the new address, not the old one.