On today’s episode, we’ll be talking about the new features of WordPress 4.3, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast episode number 246. Back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast, my name is Dustin. Today we will be talking about the new version of WordPress, WordPress 4.3. By the time you’re listening to this, you probably will see the notification appear in your dashboard to upgrade to the latest version. Today we’ll be talking about all the new cool features that are built into this new release of WordPress. Before we get there though, I want to talk about the upcoming WordPress webinar. I like to do a webinar the first Friday of every month. This helps me to create video content that’s going to be helpful for you, and I try to come up with a whole wide range of topics for things to discuss and talk about over the course of the year to make sure that I’m heading through the right direction in providing content for beginners and for people that are more advanced and would like developer type things. This month we will be talking about how to learn HTML and CSS, the basics. So basically this is going to be a webinar, just kind of highlighting some of the things that you can do within the WordPress dashboard to make your site better. Have you ever thought about, “How do I change my font color from the standard black or whatever the theme default is to green?” Have you ever wondered how to do that? You’ll learn how to do that in this webinar that’s happening on September 4th at 12:00 p.m. That’s 12:00 p.m. Eastern time, so 12:00 p.m. Eastern, and you can register today over at yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar. And I’m excited because I finally got Webinar Jam and Lead Pages all integrated together and so you’ll see a nice cool landing page there when you head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar.

So this is not going to be high level stuff. It’s going to be stuff that you can do and you can implement quite easily within the WordPress dashboard to just make your site look much nicer. Maybe sometimes you want to add columns inside your WordPress site, and all those types of things will be covered in this upcoming webinar. So again, one last time, yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar to sign up today. Okay, in the, “Is there a plugin for that?” section, there is one that I’d like to share today, and it’s called Global Hide Admin Toolbar, and you can find this one in the WordPress repository of course, but it is a plugin that adds global options to hide the frontend admin bar or the tool bar with two logged in users. So I know that there’s sometimes when you have people log into a membership site, it shows this big ugly black admin bar across the top, and people try to click on it and it really does nothing but gives the user the ability to change their username and password and some of their preferences inside WordPress and what not. But this plugin has been downloaded over 8,000 times. It can give you the opportunity to remove that for certain levels of people. So maybe if they’re only subscribers, you can remove that and they can’t see that and what not. So if you’re looking for some way to hide that global admin bar based on the user preference, then this is the plugin for you.

It’s called Global Hide Admin Toolbar. All right today we’re going to be talking about WordPress 4.3. It should be coming out very soon, like I said. I’ve been kind of following this this year. I’ve been following along in the Slack channels, and if you’re not familiar with Slack, it’s a tool that WordPress has been using to kind of talk about all the release things. There’s a bunch of different channels in there that you can join. You can join the core channel and I just saw right before I started recording this episode, which I’m recording around 12:00 p.m. on Tuesday, and they’re talking about getting the WordPress 4.3 videos almost done and they’re finalizing all the code and they’re getting ready to ship it out. So I expect it to be done sometime later today, and by the time you’re listening to this on Wednesday it should already have been released. So I’ve been following along a little bit there and just trying to get a little bit more involved when I can. So it’s kind of neat to see behind the scenes. This new core release has nothing to do with my job at Automatic, but it’s really fun to just kind of follow along the paces and we’ve been talking about this probably since, let’s see, maybe July, maybe – I’m trying to look back here in my notes at how long ago the beta started going out, and I can’t see it real quickly. Maybe, yeah, it was July that they started releasing the new beta version.

So you wanted to check that out, middle of July is when the betas first started coming out. So it’s been about a month or so that about every week a new beta comes out and I’ve been just telling you little brief pieces of updates of things that are going to be shipped with the new version of WordPress, but today we’re going to dive in and talk about all of them. And of course, there could be extra things. I doubt it, because the code base is locked and they’re just getting ready. They’re finalizing any bugs, fixing them, and then they’re going to ship it out to the world here momentarily. So before we really get dived in, I want to let you know that you will need to do a solid backup. Make sure that you back up your site before you click that update button. I know that with most WordPress installations there’s no problem whatsoever, everything’s going to work once you update to the newest version, but I highly highly recommend backing up your site so you have that solid copy of WordPress 4.2.4. And then some people are not so – they’re not so eager to upgrade to 4.3 right away. They’ll wait until 4.3.1 comes out. You can do that, but I know that 4.3 is going to include some more security, patches, if you will, so you want to make sure that you’re installing it right away. I’ve never had a problem like, I always install dev first, to put it on a local site first to make sure it doesn’t completely break your site, and then go ahead and update your site as well. So here are some of the things that WordPress 4.3 comes in. Again, it’s supposed to be released on August 18th. We’ll find out when this podcast released and later today if it actually is released on time. So the first thing that I want to share with you is faster text entry, and this is awesome.

This is a really really cool feature and this might make me come back to composing my show notes and what not in the visual editor. So right now I compose everything in Evernote, and then I transfer from Evernote and then I do it into mark down in a mark down editor, and then I paste the html that the mark down generates into WordPress, and the main reason I use mark down because it was easy to create numbered lists or ordered lists, you know, bullet points, and it was easy to create headings, and that was the main reason that I did it and I was using mark down. Well now, this type of stuff is built right into the visual editor. So if you go to your visual editor in your new version of WordPress and then you start typing your text and what not, and maybe you want something that you want to add a heading. And so what you would do is you’d type if you want a super big heading, you would type pound pound and then type your heading, and then when you click enter or hit enter with your return key, it will actually expand to the heading number two. If you want to do heading number three, it’s pound pound pound, so it’s like three pounds per heading, or the number of pounds is the heading number that you get. So six pounds would equal heading number six. And then it auto expands, so you can automatically see it right there in the visual editor. It’s the same thing that happens with bullets. If you use an asterisk or a dash, then it will automatically turn that into a bullet point, which is really cool. Numbered lists, you put one or one period, or I think it’s one and then a parentheses and it will automatically start an ordered list.

So you don’t have to worry about doing all the formatting later. It basically is helping you keep your hands on the keyboard so much more so you’ll be able to compose that draft or compose that blog post so much faster. So that’s really cool, and if you want to add a block quote, then all you have to do is add a greater than sign, and then type greater than and then you type out your block quote and you hit enter and it automatically formats it into a block quote. It is simply amazing, and it looks magical when it actually works. It’s really really cool, so I recommend checking that out when you have WordPress 4.3 installed. Another thing that you can do is in another small little enhancement that you don’t really think about until now, like, now it’s like, “Wow, why haven’t we had this forever?” But it is a preview of links. So if you want to create a hyperlink inside your text, right now what you could do with WordPress 4.2 is you could highlight it and you could go up to the menu and you click on link and then from the link area then you type in what the URL wants to be and then you click save or add or what not, and then you continue typing and then you work. Well then if you want to preview what that link is, like, “Oh, I wonder what that link was. Did I link that to the right place?” The only real way to do it, there’s a couple of ways, but you could switch to the text editor to see what the html is, or you could right click or copy the link or open in a new tab to see what it is.

Well now you have the ability to preview a link. So basically you just have to create a link and then once the link is created, just put your cursor anywhere next to that link, anywhere in the text of the link, and it’ll pop up this little module and it just will show the link and then you can click an edit button or you can hit a cancel button and you can remove that link right away. It is super slick, and you’ll definitely have to try that one out the next time. And of course all of this stuff will be backwards compatible so when you update to 4.3 then you can go back to a recent post and you can see it working as well. It is so cool. That’s probably one of my favorite features. There’s a lot of really cool features that are coming with WordPress 4.3 this week. Another thing that has been changed is there’s been changes to the word and character count. So if you’ve ever tried to say, “Oh, I’m going to create a 500 word blog post,” how it normally works is you type type type type type type, and then you’d have to hit save draft. And then as the page refreshed from the saved draft, then the word count would update. Now it’s live updating, and it will update as soon as you are done typing. I did notice when I was playing with this a little bit earlier that if you typed numbers, so if you used characters as numbers or the actual numerals, then those are not counted, and if you look at emojis, so like a smiley face or things along those lines, those only count as one character. So even though it may be colon parenthesis, it’s only going to count as one character. So those are some notable changes as well. I don’t think that that’s going to throw anybody’s word count off too much, but that’s what’s happened within the word count.

That’s pretty slick as well because it does some amazing things. Again, it just works. It’s like, why haven’t these features been in WordPress from the beginning? There have been a few new things that have been added to the customizer. Those are the next couple of points that I want to share. Menus have now been moved to the customizer, and so they’re still in both areas. You can manage them under appearance and menus or under appearance and customize, and this is really cool because you can customize everything and you can see a live preview. That’s probably one of the most powerful features of the customizer is when you are in the customizer and you make a change, whether it be to widgets or menus or site titles, like, you see that immediately. It’s right there on the left part of your screen, and it just works. You see it, it’s almost like you’re visually building your site, which is really cool. It still has all of the features built in so you can still link to, you can open into a new window, you can add a CSS class to it, you can do all that kind of stuff. It’s all built into the customizer. They basically duplicated the feature and the functionality of the menu section and added it to the customizer. I would imagine in the near future the whole menu section will just kind of disappear and won’t be there anymore and everything will be managed from the customize area. Another neat feature about customize is now there is a menu item in the admin toolbar.

So that toolbar we talked about that we could remove if we wanted to in the plugin for that section, we can actually, there’s a customize button there that you can click customize and it’ll take you right to the customizer section, so you can go in there and you can start making modifications and tweaks and stuff like that. Another thing that you can do in the customizer that’s built into WordPress 4.3 is site icons, and these are the icons that appear in a web browser. Sometimes they’re called favicons or favicons or I don’t know how you really say it, but there’s those little square images that appear in Chrome or Firefox to let people know what website they’re on. That’s there. They also show up on WordPress.com if you linked your sites with Jet Pack. Those sites and those icons can be now set in the customizer. It’s under the settings where you put the site title and the description and then right underneath that you can upload an image. So that makes it super easy to add your favicon, your site icon, whatever it is, to your WordPress site. Another thing that has been changed, for the better of course, is the list view is now better in mobile, and what so I mean by list view? That’s the time when, if you’re trying to navigate on your WordPress site on your phone or even your tablet, if you go to yourwebsite.com/wpadmin, you’re in the dashboard and then you click on “all posts” or “all pages” or “media”. All of those areas have gotten a complete overhaul, so they look so much better and they work so much nicer inside a mobile experience.

So that’s what I mean by list view is better on mobile, so that’s what that is. Two more features that I want to share. The one is called better passwords. They’re kind of code naming it better passwords, but basically if you’ve ever added somebody as an administrator on your account or even a subscriber, like you’ve wanted to just add them so they can look in your site or do whatever, you can go to the user section, you can add a new person, and you basically add their email address and it generates them a username and password or sends off a username and password via email, which is super unsecure, especially if you set them up as an administrator. And so how this works now is when you add that information, it sends the user an email that says, “Here’s how to reset your password,” and then they never actually have a password, they can just go ahead and reset their password, and then put in their secure password. So now passwords are not being sent over email, which I think is incredible. That makes a lot of sense and it’s going to make it so much more secure. Another thing that is built in, and this one may be my most favorite. It’s like the most subtle little thing, but now comments are turned off for pages. I’m so glad that this feature has made it to WordPress core. I don’t know a single person who wants to have a contact form or leave a comment on their contact form, and this means that every new page that’s created within WordPress now has the comments turned off by default. You can go in and turn them back on if you want, but they are turned off by default, which is absolutely awesome, and I think it’s going to save so many people lots of headaches from just doing, like setting up a website and then having to go and turn off comments for every single page. So those are the big user features that we’re going to see when we upgrade to the newest version of WordPress.

Even the landing page, the “Welcome to WordPress 4.3,” is looking really nice. It’s talking about how we can easily format your content and customize your site. That’s kind of the theme behind WordPress 4.3. It’s got some nice animated gifs so you can see exactly how it works. It looks really really cool. It shows how to use that formatting shortcuts, how to create better passwords, and how to use the menus and customizer, the site icon, all that kind of stuff is right in the dashboard. You’ll see that immediately after you upgrade your site to WordPress 4.3. Now I know that this episode is just a little preemptive because the software hasn’t come out yet, but I am confident that it’ll be out this week, the calendar week that begins on August 17th. I know that it’ll be out this week. I’m really excited to start updating all of my sites to the newest version of WordPress. Again, make sure that you are spending a little bit of time to back up your site first, and then once your site is backed up and you’re ready to go, then you can click that update button and you can update to the latest version of WordPress. All right, well that is going to wrap up this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in, and remember about the webinar that’s coming up, and that’s going to be on September 4th. It’s going to be at 12:00 p.m. Eastern and we’re going to talk about WordPress and we’re going to talk about how to make it better with html and CSS, making color changes or size adjustments and things like that to your text. This is going to be a webinar for you. Head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar to sign up, and we’ll talk to you again soon. Take care.