WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” Released – Favorite New Features (with Screenshots & GIFs)
November 28, 2017 Reading Time: 2 Minutes
WordPress 4.9, “Tipton” was released on November 16, 2017 (named after jazz musician Billy Tipton).
WordPress 4.9 is an update that you may miss if you’re not a developer or using the Customizer for your website. As with most of these incremental WordPress updates, these won’t be noticed by most of our customers, but it’s important to see the various WordPress updates as they unfold.
Customizer
There are a variety of updates in the Customizer including:
Schedule Customizer Updates
Likes pages and posts, now when you make changes with the Customizer, you’ll be able to schedule these updates to become live on your website in the future.
Themes
You’ll now be able to browse all of the themes in the WordPress marketplace and preview them on your website before you install them.
Widgets
There are a few updates to widgets:
Gallery Widget
In WordPress 4.8, came the introduction of media widgets.
Now, there is also a gallery widget.
Text Widgets (Media Button)
You can now add media within text widgets.
oEmbed Support
eEmbed (when you link to say, a YouTube video and the video is automatically formatted for you) is now available in widgets and other areas of WordPress.
Code Editing
Now, the majority of our customers aren’t going to touch this feature, but it’s worth mentioning.
Now, in various areas where you can edit code (within WordPress), there is a more usable code editor. We highly recommend to never edit any code on your website within WordPress. Primarily because there isn’t an “undo” function. If you accidentally remove a line of code and press update, you’re out of luck.
By the way, if you’re editing code on your website, it’s probably time to hire a WordPress professional and get back to focusing on your business!
* Word of Warning
As with all WordPress updates, there can be issues that appear once you’ve updated WordPress.
Make sure you’re always taking complete WordPress website backups. We recommend taking daily backups as a standard precaution. The last thing you want to do is update WordPress to find out your website is broken for all your customers to see.
Call or text 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!) Better yet, ask about our safe WordPress and Plugin updating service!
More Info
For more information, View WordPress’ official release.
Written by Shawn Hooghkirk on November 28, 2017
Last updated on May 04, 2020. Shawn is the President of Graticle, Inc.