On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the latest release of WordPress, WordPress 4.7, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 315.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and I hope that you are having a great December and you’ve started to implement some of those shortcuts to speed up your WordPress development that we talked about last week.

I know that I’ve spent a lot of time just optimizing and just trying to make my workflow so much nicer and so much easier and so that’s one of my passions. And, if you haven’t listened to that episode, go back over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/314. You’re going to listen to Episode No. 314.

Okay. Today, the big announcement, of course, is WordPress 4.7 is now available. I’ve got a link in the Show Notes for the post right there from wordpress.org but we’re going to dive into that as the full part of the episode. So, let’s leave that there and we’ll get back to that in just a second.

The other thing that I want to talk about today is Flywheel, the hosting company that I use and highly, highly recommend. It now has a brand-new app. It’s called Local and it is basically, they acquired some software from Pressmatic and they’re releasing it – they’re re-releasing it – and it’s now called Local by Flywheel and it’s completely free.

Now, you may be wondering, “Okay. What is Local? What does that do?” It basically allows you to run a local version of your WordPress website. So, in the past, I’ve talked a lot about DesktopServer and DesktopServer-this, DesktopServer-that, do-things-locally DesktopServer.

Well, DesktopServer is a premium update, or it’s a premium plugin; a premium app to run on your computer. And now, we’ve got Local, which is by Flywheel and it’s completely free. And so, it is a brand-new technology.

I haven’t had a chance to, like, put it through all of its ropes and all the tests yet but it’s really, really simple. You can – With one click, you can create a site. You can create that locally, right there on your computer. You can make your edits and show your clients, via a demo URL. This is really, really cool.

So, a lot of times when you’re doing dev work and you’re doing it on local environment, it’s really hard to show your clients what you’re doing and what you’ve been up to besides sending them some screen shots or taking, like, everything you’ve worked on and then just push it to a server somewhere. This really works.

And one of my teammates, Caleb, was able to go in and he, like, created a demo site and he shared a link and we were able to click on it and we could see exactly, like, his – what his development environment looked like on his computer, which was really, really cool.

And then, there’s going to be some functionality just built in there. It’s not quite ready but to push one-click publish right to your Flywheel website, which is really, really nice.

So, the cool part, too, is with Flywheel, you have the ability to go in. You can set your different PHPs area – or PHP areas. You know, you can set your different PHP versions; you can tinker with some of the settings and it’s just really, really nice.

They’ve got blueprints built in, so something that I will set up is, like, a blueprint for – that’s got WordPress in 4.7. It’s got WooCommerce, the latest version, and then it’s got maybe the storefront theme and I can get rid of all the other themes and other plugins I don’t use and that can be my (quote/unquote) “base install”. And so, whenever I need to spin-up a brand-new site to do some debugging for a customer or client, then I’ve got that all set up. DesktopServer has that ability built in as well but this is the brand-new thing out by Flywheel.

And my goal is to – in a couple episodes from now – talk about this in more detail, spend some time playing with it and just really put it through its paces and really get an overarching idea of how this works. Kind of a timeframe is, like, next week, if we’re going to be talking about State of the Word, the keynote address that Matt gave at WordCamp US, which was in Philadelphia this year. And so, that’s next week and then the week after that, we’re going to dive into what this is – what exactly Local is by Flywheel. So, that’s something to look forward to.

Alright, in the “Is there a plugin for that?” section, there is a plugin today that I want to share with you called Code Embed. And this provides a very easy and efficient way to embed code – either JavaScript or HTML – in your post or pages. So this is incredibly useful when you are trying to embed a video when it’s required or, in some different browsers, it won’t work right. You can do server side codes; it’s PHP and it’s all built right in to this plugin. The plugin’s got more than 10,000 active installs and so, this is definitely one that you might want to check out.

You can do JavaScript-specific things. If you only want to load it for one or two particular pages, you can add that. You can do global embedding, so you can embed something on a – You know, if you wanted to do, like – I’m guessing that you could probably do, like, Google Analytics; you can embed that code and you can embed that site-wide. Just tons of stuff that you can do and start using and experimenting with, if you are interested in adding that without adding a bunch, a bunch of code. So, that is the plugin that I want to share with you this week.

Alright. Now, moving on to the main segment of the show, we’re going to talk about WordPress 4.7. We’re going to talk a little bit, first, about the new release cycle. And, as we’ve been getting very familiar with these – the three times a year, every four months, we get a brand new version of WordPress and, I mean, this year, we got 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7.

Well, Matt alluded to it in his State of the Word and then he had some other interviews. Especially, there was one on poststatus.com that talked about the new release cycle a little bit. And it’s really going in to the fact that WordPress is now, you know, 13, 14 years old and we’ve been working through, you know, this process of continually updating WordPress and making it better.

And the way that they’ve been working on it in the past has been – Okay. They’re going to have these features as plugins and, as those features are built, they’re built as plugins and then when the plugin’s all ready to go, then they merge that code into WordPress Core. And then, that way, they can stay on the timeline in a schedule so they – You know, they knew that, you know, December-whatever – you know, the date of the WordPress 4.7 came out – they knew that that was going to be released.

And so, December 6th or whatever – So, they knew – Like, that was what they were shooting for and if some features didn’t make the cut, they didn’t make the cut. They just, like, didn’t allow them to be added as part of WordPress Core.

And so, that’s not really the best way to do development. Like, we want to make sure that we’re working on features and so, the one – the three features that we’re going – that are going to be worked on in Twenty Seventeen is REST API and, not only just building out, but actually using it for things – and then, the editor and then broad customization. So, those were kind of the three big, main points that Matt kind of pointed in to.

And so, the editor is, you know – How do WordPress users use the editor? What do they highlight? How do they work with their text and does that include, like, WYSIWYG drop and – drag-and-drops of – Like, the – I’m not sure, exactly, what those things will look like in the future but those are going to be the process and these are the major pain points that Matt highlights.

The customizations is all about the Customizer and how can we make that user interface so much nicer and so much easier for brand-new people that are to the WordPress environment. How can we make that work easier for them?

So, that’s kind of where it’s – the trajectory is going to go next year. These are the major pain points and will be the only areas worked on for releases in 2017. Now, they’ll be some small, little bug fixes and tweaks and stuff like that, that will get worked on, but no more big, top-level things. These are what’s going to be worked on in 2017.

So, let’s go ahead and dive into what WordPress 4.7 is. So, WordPress 4.7 is nicknamed “Vaughan” and it has been released with the all-new WordPress REST API. It’s got endpoints for the REST API. It’s got a new default theme. We’ve got many Customizer features and just much, much more. There’s just a ton of stuff added to this and we’re going to listen to the WordPress video right now and then we’ll go ahead and we’ll unpack some of these features as well.

The video isn’t as great to – It’s great to just listen to and hear some of the features but some of the screen shots and stuff that’s in the video make it much nicer. But let’s go ahead and just listen to it now.

Male Speaker: WordPress 4.7, Vaughan, named after jazz legend, Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan, makes it easier than ever to set up your website the way you wanted.

Meet Carly. Carly operates a pet store and needs a website. Carly looks at her options and discovers WordPress. With WordPress, Carly can choose from thousands of free themes to fit her needs. Carly’s decided on Twenty Seventeen, a brand new theme for WordPress, built from the ground up for businesses.

Twenty Seventeen includes a sleek design – with large images throughout – perfect for both small businesses, like a pet store, and larger businesses. Because this is a brand-new site, Twenty Seventeen will show some starter content to help Carly visualize how it can work for her store and get started with customizing to fit. New visual edit shortcuts show what aspects of her site can be changed right there, within the live preview.

As she customizes her theme, Carly notices that she can add a video to her header. She chooses a video she shot of her niece with a puppy and adds the video header to her site, directly from her tablet. Because you can create pages while editing menus in the Customizer in WordPress 4.7, Carly can continue building her site structure without breaking her current workflow.

Carly wants to make one more change before she’s ready to share her site – make the name of her store more noticeable. The new CSS panel makes this easy and shows your changes live, as you build.

And with that, she publishes the brand new website for her pet store. Carly is happy.

WordPress 4.7 includes all of these features and more, along with exciting developer features like REST API content endpoints. WordPress 4.7, Vaughan – helping you set up your site the way you want it.

Dustin Hartzler: Alright. Yeah, some of those features that they talked about in the video are the Twenty Seventeen theme, which is a brand new theme and it is a fabulous theme. It’s one of those themes that is a lot more basic – kind of more along the lines of, like, Twenty Twelve. Those are kind of very similar.

I know that Twenty Fourteen was one that was all about the magazine layout and whatnot but this one is really great. It’s built specifically for small businesses to highlight in a website, in either just a single page or a multi-page website, which is really nice.

The – The, also, thing that’s built in is starter content. So this will slowly be added by themes and they’ll be adding content to make it easier to set up and configure that theme. You know that that’s probably one of the biggest pain points of WordPress, is you install a brand-new theme and then it’s, like – Oh. None of the stuff looks anything like the template or the demo that’s running. And so, that’s really nice as well.

Now, another piece that they talked about in this video was all about editing in the Customizer. And so, if you go with WordPress 4.7, in the Customizer you use in Twenty Seventeen – because, again, this all will be built in to themes that are coming out. You know, the theme authors will have to add this but you’ll see little pencil areas, where you can click on the pencil and, like, maybe it’s a – maybe you want to change the header. You click on the pencil by the header and then you can just change the name of your website, from whatever to whatever.

But you don’t have to search through the Customizer to find that setting anymore. It’s almost like a live preview or live editor of your website when you’re logged in but it’s got that left-hand panel with the Customizer features. It’s really, really slick and I think that it’s going to make setting up that theme, initially, that much easier.

You can click on the Widget Areas and it will automatically pull in the right Widget Areas inside the Customizer and it’s – it really works. It works really well because of the – you know, the backend JavaScript that’s running, that allows all of this to happen without a page reload. And I think that’s going to really, really help speed up the development of WordPress websites.

Another thing from inside of that Customizer that I absolutely am in love with is the CSS. You can add CSS right there, inside the Customizer, and as you type – as you say, you know, text or font size, you know, 55 pixels – like, you’ll see that instantly on your website. There’s no more of this – Okay. Let’s write the CSS in a third-party plugin and then save it and then refresh. There’s none of that anymore. You can just type it and, as live as you’re typing it, it automatically updates, which is really slick as well.

Then the final good piece that – or the brand-new piece that came inside of the WordPress Customizer – is now you can add new pages. So before, in the past, you used to – when you were setting up your menus, for example – you would have to go and you’d have to think, “Okay. I need these five pages: I need the Contact page; I need the About page; I need a News page; I need a, you know – a Privacy page; and I need the Home page.” Or whatever, you know, pages you’re thinking of.

You had to go to the Pages area and set all of those up – maybe generate a little bit of dummy content for each one of them – then you could go back to the Customizer or the Menus area and then start adding the Menu options and the items and – But now, you can do that all from the Customizer, which is really, really nice.

I keep saying “really, really nice”. These are a lot of, like, small little improvements and enhancements that I think are going to go a long way when it comes to just building and using and experiencing our WordPress sites.

Another thing that has been built in is they adjusted the layout of the editor just slightly. They’ve – this is a very minor change but they’ve changed the header – or the headings drop-down has been moved from the bottom row to the top row.

So, if you – maybe you’ve never experienced this before – but WordPress, when you’re using the visual editor, there’s two rows of buttons for customizing things. You know, whether that be bolding the text or underlining or justifying the text left or right or whatever. There’s two rows and the first row always is displayed but then, if you click the very last button on that – on the top row – it’s, like, “Show Everything” – and then it shows the second row.

And you used to have to click the “Show Everything” and then go down to highlight and change your font from, like, a heading text to a paragraph text. They’ve moved that up to the upper row, so that’s always there. And they’ve moved the strike-through and the horizontal rule behind – or down below – to kind of keep that menu bar a little bit, you know, succinct and very, very tightly organized.

So, they’ve moved some items from the top, down to the bottom, and the biggest one was that one where you can select what type of text you’re using to the top row, which is really nice.

The video headers – There was another thing they talked about in the menu that you can now add videos to your headers and the cool part, too, is that you can go and just use YouTube videos or, like, links to YouTube videos, which is nice. So you don’t actually have to even embed them on your website. And so, that works really well as well.

Let’s – I’m trying to see if there’s other things here that we want to talk about that’s all about this brand-new version of WordPress.

It is a huge effort and there were tons and tons of people that put forth effort and just spent time. You know, the volunteer time, remember – most of these people do not get paid to do any of this work and they’ve taken the time to go and update that.

Let’s see, here. The release had – there were 482 contributors and that was the most ever. And 205 of those 482 people were contributing for the very first time. And so, that is a lot of stuff in there.

I guess, other things that are built in is the PDF thumbnail previews. So, if you upload a PDF, now it will show you a thumbnail instead of just a generic icon inside of your media library.

And you can also change the WordPress Dashboard without affecting the language of your website. So, this is very, very helpful – especially for me, working in WooCommerce support – that a lot of times, we get a Russian website or we get somebody from France and you go to their website and you can’t see or you can’t understand anything. And you can’t go and change that setting for language, because then that changes your website’s language. And so, this is built in, that you can change the language inside of a particular profile.

So, if somebody creates a user profile for you to set up their website, then you can change what WordPress language is displayed on the back end, which is just – that’s going to save tons of time. You think you know where all the links are until they’re in a different language and it’s, like – I don’t really know where these things are. And it’s really, really hard to find.

So, that’s WordPress 4.7. That’s called – tag name is Vaughan and it is out there. It’s been out for almost a week now and so, I highly recommend just doing a backup of your website and then going out and updating and then getting some of these latest and greatest features.

I would have zero concern. I’ve updated a few sites and have no problems, whatsoever. Like, everything just seems to work, which is a beautiful thing – especially when there’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of websites updating. I’m sure that there’s stats out there somewhere of showing how many websites have been updated already to WordPress 4.7 and it’s probably in the tens of millions already.

And – yeah. So, that’s what I wanted to share with you this week. Remember, next week, we’re going to be talking about the State of the Word – kind of the recap of what we’re looking forward to; kind of a year – looking back at the year that’s happened within WordPress within the last twelve months or so, since the last WordCamp US. And then, we’re kind of projecting into the future – some of the things that Matt has kind of envisioned for the future of WordPress and where we’re going to go in the next couple months or the next year, if you will.

So, that’s WordPress 4.7. I recommend updating – spend some time, you know, testing some things out and updating or maybe it’s a good Christmas week project, when you’re off from work and you’re wondering, “What can I do when there’s so much snow outside?”

Okay, maybe there’s not snow where you live but it’s snowing here today and it’s our first bit of snow for the year. So, I’m all ready to stay inside and do nothing the rest of the year.

So, with that, that’s all I’m going to say this week. That’s all I’ve got for you and next week, again, we’ll talk about the – what to look forward to in the next year with WordPress.

Until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.