WordPress 4.7, “Vaughan” was released on December 6, 2016 (named in honor of jazz singer Sarah Vaughn).
WordPress 4.7 is another incremental update for 2016. The majority of the updates won’t be used or noticed by the majority of our customers, but they are worth mentioning since they do show a sign of things to come with the future of WordPress.
New 2017 Default Theme
As with every year, WordPress has released a new 2017 theme.
With the new theme, there are a variety of features, including:
Ability to add a video to the header of your website
Instead of a static image, you can now add a video in the header of your website in the new 2017 WordPress theme. Just to clarify, this is for the new 2017 theme. This capability/technology has been available on the internet before now as we’ve provided this to many of our customers on their WordPress websites.
Focus on the Customizer
There has been a lot of attention paid to the customizer in this release.
Starter content
WordPress will now include optional starter content so that you can visualize how your website will look. Now, you’ll be able to edit the existing starter content to your liking and be ready to go live that much sooner.
Visual edit shortcuts within the live editor in Customizer
If your theme includes this feature, you can now view edit shortcuts within the Customizer. You can then click those icons and make changes to that area in real-time.
I would love to see WordPress focus more on these types of improvements in the future, and take it a step further. When someone clicks on a block of text, allow the admin to change that text right there, not throuhg a menu item in a sidebar. It would be a huge benefit. Of course, there are many, many challenges to this approach, but I feel it’s needed to really help WordPress continue leading the CMS (Content Mangement System) industry.
Creating pages within the Customizer
You can now create pages within the Customizer. Not a huge improvement, but it does showcase where WordPress is focusing their energy and that’s the Customizer.
CSS Edit Live Previews
Now, when you’re adding CSS code to the Customizer, you can view those changes in real-time, before you publish. Once you’re happy with the result, you can go live with your changes.
PDF Preview in Media Library
Instead of viewing an icon for the PDF in the media library, you’ll see a preview thumbnail (like images and videos currently appear).
* Word of Warning
We’ve already seen a few websites have issues with this update (including our own!), so be cautious before clicking update to this latest version.
Make sure you’re always taking complete WordPress website backups before making any major changes. We recommend taking database backups daily, and full site backups weekly as a standard precaution.
Call us to find out more information on how we can install our backup solution on your WordPress website: (360) 450-3711 (be sure to mention this post!)
More Info
For more information, View WordPress’ official release or watch the video below:
