On today’s episode, we are gonna talk about our brand new version of WordPress, that’s WordPress 4.5, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 281.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin, and today we will be talking about the brand new version of WordPress. And it seems like it’s been a long time since I’ve talked to you. I’ve got a bunch of newsy-type stuff to talk about that’s happening in the WordPress space over the last week or so, or couple of weeks, because I’ve been out of town for a little bit. I was to Austin, Texas for Woo Conf and for a team meetup, and so both of those things did not disappoint. Austin was an amazing town. Lots of really good food, if you ever get to make it to that part of the world. The brisket was amazing, we had tacos, and pretty much meat pretty much the entire time.

So, it’s great to be back, but Woo Conf was an awesome conference. I was there for one day. I got to see a lot of my colleagues there that I don’t normally get to see or get to work with, and then we also got to meet people in the community, people that I’ve had the opportunity of knowing through Word Press and through Woo Commerce and that was just a lot of fun. So, I was there for one day. I went to the community lunch, was the Friday, the last day of the event, and got to meet some fun people as well. I also was able to troubleshoot and help out somebody with his live site right there at lunch, which was kind of fun.

Then, moving on, Friday through the next Thursday, I was in Austin with our team for a team meetup. It was all about just working in person, getting to know each other, and having fun together. So, I learned a lot about Woo Commerce and Woo Commerce shipping, so if you do have any questions, don’t use the contact form like I normally say, but head on over to woothemes.com and submit a ticket and we’ll be happy to answer it and kind of sort out the configuration or any type of problems you may be having. So, I’ve learned a lot and had great food, and it was just an overall amazing experience. So, that is kind of just a wrap-up of what’s happening in the last two weeks.

It feels like it’s been so much longer. There’s so many things that happened. You know, Word Press 4.5 came out. One of the other big things in the news is that wordpress.com now turned on HTTPS encryption for all websites, and so Automatic is now behind – they’re using a project, it’s called Let’s Encrypt Project, and it’s making it cheaper and easier to implement HTTP across the web. And basically Automatic did this for all sites that are on wordpress.com, whether it’s got a custom domain name or it’s just using the sitename.wordpress.com. All of those sites are now HTTPS, which is really, really cool.

I’ve also found an article on WP Tavern that now that sucuri.net is a website company that specializes in securing WordPress sites. Now, if you’re a customer, they will also provide you an HTTPS SSL certificate through Let’s Encrypt as well. So, those are the two big companies that are using it, so Automatic and Sucuri, and so if you’re a customer of either one of those, you may want to check it out and have your SSL certificate turned on for your website, to make it that much more secure.
Another thing that I just wanted to share real quick about Woo Conf that I forgot is Woo Conf did a – part of the Woo Conf presentation at the very beginning was a State of the Woo with Matt Mullenweg. He was there and he basically summed up some of the things that have been going on in eCommerce space today. There’s more than 190 million people buying products online, 28 percent of businesses online, and so that means that 62 percent of businesses aren’t selling online, so there’s a lot left to do, says Matt. Then he takes a little history through Woo Commerce, talks about how Woo Commerce 1.0 was launched in September of 2011 and that year there was zero downloads. It had one free theme and six official themes and nine extensions.

So, there wasn’t a lot of – not a lot happened back in 2011, and if you look at Woo Commerce today, 2.5 launched under Automatic’s new leadership. It’s got improvements to refunds, the UI, the rest API and speed, the latest edition 2.5 version was downloaded 13.8 million times. It has 1 million site installations and 400+ extensions. And so, the team has grown, and is including me as well, it has grown over to 76 people across 18 countries, and there’s even more than 400 contributers for Woo Commerce because Woo Commerce is open, anybody can contribute to it, and that’s pretty cool.

I’m trying to see if there’s anything else highlighting in this. Woo Commerce 2.6 is slated to release in May. Storefront, which is the free theme that comes with Woo Commerce, is set to release very, very soon, and there’s a lot more coming down the pipeline for Woo Commerce. So, that’s kind of just an overall State of the Woo, and that’s kind of very similar to what Matt does at the State of the Word address, and that’s usually at the Word Camp US. And so, those are a couple things that I wanted to share with you today.

Also, lastly, I just wanted to let you know about this. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes if you want to comment or leave a comment. Right now, the post has 83 comments and it was just posted on Friday last week. So, this is basically, the title of the post on WP Tavern says “Please Stop Abusing WordPress Admin Notices,” and it’s just talking about how some plugins are adding admin notices that are undismissable and that always stay there, and I see this happening so often on WordPress sites when I log in to troubleshoot or to help a customer out. They’ve got 14, 15 different notices across the top. They can’t even really do anything until they scroll. Some of them they can’t turn off and some of them they can’t turn on. And it’s basically like just a conversation back and forth about why people are doing it, and if you have any thoughts or opinions about that, go ahead and you can comment over there on WP Tavern, and it’s called, “Please Stop Abusing WordPress Admin Notices.”

Okay, lastly, before we get to the meat of the show, I want to talk about a plugin that’s called PayPal Donations and this is a plugin that allows you to simply set up a short code for a PayPal donation button, which makes it really, really simple. There’s also a text widget if you are interested in getting donations on your website and you don’t want to go through the hassle of going through to PayPal’s page and then figuring out where the HTML code is and copying and pasting, all that kind of stuff. You can add your PayPal donation button with a widget or even a short code. And it’s very simple, the short code is [paypal-donation] and then if you wanted to put a purpose in there or a reference or anything else, you can add all that information in here as well. It’s a free plugin on the WordPress Repository. It’s got more than 40,000 downloads, and so if this is something that you’re interested in on your website, then definitely take a look at that.

And lastly, right before we get started, I know that the announcements and the beginning of the show is going forever, but I just wanted to give you a little win from my side of things. When I was in Texas, I had one morning when I didn’t have a lot of responsibilities and so I was actually working on some things on Your Website Engineer. And the biggest thing that I was trying to do was I was trying to change the text for the segment called “Is There a Plugin for That” and that little segment has changed quite a bit over the last couple of years, or the last probably year and a half or so. There was, I don’t know, a hundred and some episodes that needed to be edited and I was able to kind of parse my way through trying to figure out how to write a find and replace statement right from the WordPress database. And after about an hour or so, I was almost ready to give up and just say, “Okay, I’ll just update the text like five at a time,” you know, five pages at a time, and then I’ll eventually get through it.

Well, it turns out that I changed – I was doing a find and replace, but yet all the text wasn’t the same. About halfway through the year, I had changed the text, changed the script that I was using for that line, and so then I had to kinda figure out okay, what is – I had to find – there was like three or four different pieces of code that I was searching for and so I’ve made them all custom, or they’re all the same all the way across the site, and now the section shows with more than 43,000 plugins in the WordPress Repository. Now the very next time that I need to update that, say when there’s more than 44,000 plugins, all I have to do is I can do a find and replace for 43,000 and then change it to 44,000.

So, I think that’s just kind of a neat little hack to think programmatically when you are designing something in your website. If you’re doing something that’s gonna be very, very similar on lots of episodes, or lots of posts, like for example, I used the same text expander snippet to kind of create my show notes. So, someday if I want to change the announcements section to “What’s Happening in WordPress,” like I could go ahead and I could do a find and replace and replace those all the way across my site. And just to give it a little bit more jazz or flair, or if I decide in the future to change the format of my show notes, I can do a find and replace and really make it a very, very smooth process.

So, with that, let’s go ahead and dive into WordPress 4.5. This was released on April 12th, that was just a week ago, and it named Coleman in honor of jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and it’s available to download right from your WordPress directory. I haven’t seen how many downloads, but I know there’s been millions of downloads in the last week or so. So, I’m gonna play this one minute kind of clip, and it’s just kind of highlighting the key points of WordPress 4.5, and then I’ll dive in and talk about some of the features.

WordPress 4.5 Coleman, named for jazz legend Coleman Hawkins, streamlines your workflow, whether you’re writing your content or building your website. With responsive previews in the customizer, you don’t need your phone to check out your site on the mobile web. Just use the layout toggles to preview your website on different size screens. While you’re there, stop by the site’s identity settings and, if your theme supports it, add a logo to your website. We’ve made subtle changes in the editor that will improve your writing experience. Now, when you click to insert a link, a field appears inline, allowing you to insert a URL whether it’s on your site or elsewhere on the web. And this release sees the introduction of even more formatting shortcuts to keep you typing and improve your flow. Enclose your text in back ticks to turn it into code, or add three dashes to insert a horizontal line. And that’s just a glimpse at WordPress 4.5, a release focused on making it easier for you to write and to publish. WordPress 4.5 Coleman, for a more streamlined experience.

Alright, so that is a little bit, a short recap of what’s happening in WordPress 4.5, what happened and has been released. But let’s dive in and let’s talk about it just a little bit. So, the very first thing is a lot of these features show up in the Customizer, and the Customizer is found under Appearance and then Customize. And that brings in that tab from the left hand side and it gives you the ability to do all kinds of things. You can now change your widgets in there, you can set your site identity, you can do a lot more things now, a lot more features and customizations are coming right to this.

And so the very first thing that I want to share is now WordPress 4.5 is using a little bit of code from Jetpack, but it is allowing theme developers to declare a logo right from the Customizer. And so, this is just a standard that allows it to be very, very easy for team developers to just call and use this section of the Customizer so then you don’t have to have an extra menu area where they upload an image and all that jazz. And so, there’s been hundreds of implementations with all the different themes that are out there, and so now this is kind of like the standard. So, if you’re building themes and you want your customer or your client to be able to upload an image for a header image or a logo, then this is the best method to do this.

Another thing that the Customizer got is live, responsive previews and selective refresh. So, this is an update that makes a huge difference and it almost makes it like you’re live-editing your website. Your previews are more instant. Basically, if you want to change your heading or change your site tagline, you just start typing right there in the Customizer and you’ll see it live-typing right there on the live preview pane, which is really, really nice. And of course, now that I see that, I’m like, “How did that work before,” but mainly before, it updated once you were done typing or if you click Save and you saved the settings in the feature. So, this is really cool. It actually even will change emoticons, like a smiley face, to an actual image of a smiley. So, that’s pretty cool as well.

Also, in the Customizer, now you’ll see little buttons in the bottom right hand corner and there’s a desktop icon, a tablet icon, and a phone icon. Basically, you click these and it will shrink the screen size from your full page view of your website down to a tablet size view, down to a mobile view or a phone view, so you don’t have to grab for your phone or your tablet to see what your website looks like on these different sites. They’ve had something like this on wordpress.com for a while and it is so super helpful because you can see it in that native resolution and then if you need the Chrome browser tools to see what kind of style is going on or you want to do some previewing and stuff, you can do all of that right there and you can add your CSS if you’ve got CSS enabled right there, and you can see the live preview, which is really, really cool.

I keep saying “really, really cool,” like that’s – for me, all of this stuff is like, “Wow, why didn’t we have this before?” It just seems like hey, this is what WordPress should be. This how it should always be, but we always get these little features that just make it work so much better.

The next thing that has been added, and of course I’m gonna say it’s really, really cool, is it gives a more intuitive interface for editing inline URLs. And so, what that means is if you highlight a piece of text in your post and then you click on the link button, it’s going to bring up this little widget and you can start typing to search. It actually will allow you to link to posts inside of your own website, or you can post to, you know, it’s going to find out different URLs from other websites too, is what it appears that it will work like that. So, it’s a nice, handy feature, especially if you link to a lot of posts inside of your own post. I know that I don’t do this a lot, but I know that some people may have like a four-part series, and then they wanna say Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Now you can highlight that and you can start typing what the name of that post is and it will go ahead and just auto-complete that. It just makes that user interface so much nicer. It makes it so that you don’t have to click away and go to another tab, and look up what that URL is, and come back and then paste it in. So, I really like this feature and I can see using this a lot.

And another thing that they’ve added, in the last version they added some features to be able to do strong or bolded text and italicized text and then header sized images by kind of writing in markdown and it auto-changes right there in front of your eyes, right there in your WordPress dashboard. And now you can add, if you want to add a horizontal rule, you add three dashes, so just dash, dash, dash, and if you want to make something wrapped in code, you basically just put a back tick, and the back tick is right there above the tab key. And so, you can go ahead and put the back tick and then type your word, and then a back tick and then that will all be rendered in code. And then, of course, however your theme renders code or visualizes code, you can see that as well.

So, those are some of the big things that you’ll be able to notice when you get into WordPress 4.5. Again, before you go out there and update your site, make sure that you do have a good, solid backup. I know that they’re always prone to things happening when you update to a new version of software, so you do want to make sure you do it on a development site first, make sure that you’re not breaking your live site and so you’re frantically trying to restore an old site or whatnot.
So, those are the key features to look at and look for. Other noteworthy updates that are included was there is improvements to comment moderation screen, and so that’s nice. It gives you the visual enhancements and a maximum length for comment form fields if you want to limit how much people can actually comment on your website. They also did performance enhancements for images. So, they increased the compression that makes images load 50 percent faster with no noticeable quality loss, which is pretty nice. Another thing that’s kind of behind the scenes, they’ve added an enhanced script loader and so it gives better support for script header footer dependencies. And so when you add different pieces of JavaScript or whatever, now you can use a WP add inline script, which allows it to work just that much better so that you can add it in a different place other than the header or the footer. And now it says better embed templates are now split into parts where they can be customized by themes using the template hierarchy.

So, that is everything that was added to WordPress 4.5. It was released last week. There was 286 people that contributed to WordPress 4.5. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get in with this development cycle. I know that I keep following on the WordPress slack group and it just seems like I’ve been really busy with learning how Woo Commerce works and all that kind of stuff, to spend time inside of WordPress and help to push out a new version of code. So, now that I’ve been – I’ve been doing a little bit of work behind the scenes at Automatic, learning how to do pull requests properly and to submit patches and that kind of stuff. And so now that I’m more comfortable with that, then I think I can do that a little more on the wordpress.org side of things and help out to contributing to our software that we use every single week and we just want to make it that much better for all users, especially people that are coming brand new for the first time to using WordPress, a self-hosted version for their website.

Alright, so it’s time. If you haven’t updated your sites to WordPress 4.5, that’s going to be the theme of this week. I know that I’ve got a little bit of work to do to get my sites updated. My deb sites are updated, now I just have to push those changes live and make sure that everything works perfectly, and then I’ll be all updated. Just haven’t gotten around to it with all the traveling I did last week. But now I’m ready, I’m back, I’m committed, I’ve got some great shows lined up for you in the next couple of weeks. So, until then, take care, and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye!