On today's episode we are going to talk about the brand new version of WordPress. WordPress 4.9, right here on Your Website Engineer podcast episode number 364. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I'm excited to bring you this 364th episode all about WordPress 4.9. It's a big thing. It's happening in the news but before we get to that let's do – go ahead and dive into other news items and a plug in to share with you.

Today I do want to share with you – with the upcoming Black Friday holiday – the Thanksgiving time frame here in the United States, tons and tons of WordPress or retailers or WordPress services or things are having sales and deals and I’ve put together a page over at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/BlackFriday. That's all one word – put Black Friday all together and I'll just kind of list all the things out there that I see that – that's coming up. And that could be hosting packages. It could be services. I know like – there's just a whole bunch of different services that are out there that are having great deals this Black Friday. So if you're interested in finding out what's happening in the WordPress community during the Black Friday sale, Cyber Monday sale, then definitely check out YourWebsiteEngineer.com/BlackFriday.

And as a listener to this podcast – I know that you like podcast so there is a couple other podcasts that may interest you. They’re both with Matt Mullenweg and the first one is over on post status and it is an interview about the WordPress ecosystem and it is about an hour long – a podcast and talking about WordPress 4.9 features around customization and what's coming with the Gutenberg editor and what it's like to do a – what it’s like to be the day to day lead of WordPress project and the decision about react or no react. All that kind of stuff is talked about. Brian Krogsgard is the interviewer and Matt Mullenweg is the interviewee. This is quite an interesting podcast. I haven't listened to the whole thing yet but I try – I tend to before I – will actually see Matt in next week in WordCamp U. S. in Nashville, Tennessee.

And so that is one of the podcasts with him and then the other one is called Matt Mullenweg off with – off the record. And both of the links for these are in the show notes. And this one was a neat interview; it was one that asked a lot of questions weren't normally the same type interview questions – a little bit more about him off the record, like some of the things in his past and one of the most embarrassing things that happened to him when he started Automattic and what not. So those are great two podcasts to listen to and if you've got time in the next week or so I recommend checking them out and hearing what Matt has to say on those things.

Then I want to share with you a plugin and this one is a cool one that I found this week. It is a new plugin. It's only got a few hundred active installs and this is a plugin that will allow you to add a dynamic button or dynamic menu item and it toggles between logged in or logged out. And so this is perfect for a website that has logged in users and so if it is – if someone is not logged in WordPress, it'll say log in or you can – you can customize the text to say whatever you want. You can say log into XYZ.com or whatever. And then if they are logged in then that button automatically changes and now it says logged out.

It's a very simple plugin but it's got a lot of value because if you want to easily toggle between a log in button and a logged out button without having both there, this is a perfect plugin to do that. And so if you're looking for that look for log in or log out menu item on the WordPress repository or you – as always you can look at the show notes for episode number 364.

Alright, today we're going to talk about WordPress 4.9 and that is called Tipton. It is named in honor of jazz musician and bandleader Billy Tipton and is available to download and update your WordPress dashboard. Now this came out last Wednesday so a lot of your websites may have already updated specifically to this. A lot of them automatically handle some of these changes. I know that Flywheel had already updated. Pressable had already updated and some of the other web hosts out there have already updated to 4.9. Some of the features in a – in a real nut shell and then we’ll break them down is – and it has now designed draft, scheduling, and locking, along with preview links with the customizer – a lot of cool things that came in the customizer. It now has code syntax highlighting, error checking, and they've made some new changes to gallery widgets and some theme browsing, switching, and what not.

So let's go ahead and dive right in. The biggest and most amount changes came in that customizer and you can find the customizer by going to appearance and then customize and it opens up this whole kind of new editor experience. It’s on the left hand side. There's lots and lots of menu items there and now here's the things that you can do within the customizer. You can schedule and draft site design changes. So just like you can design and draft and revise post and schedule them to go live at the date and time of your choosing, now you can tinker with your site's design and schedule these designs to go change later as you please.

This was a question that came up at WordCamp Cincinnati when we're talking about changing themes and working on them and then going back to the other theme or are making changes – like you couldn't before in the past like make changes in the customizer and save them and not – and them not be visible but now you can. Now you can go in – you can save them as a draft. Maybe you're changing the colors or adding a banner or customizing some widget or doing whatever. Now you can make those changes and save them and then they can go live at a specific time, which is really cool.

Now another thing that's cool with the customizers, now you can collaborate with design preview links. So you can make all kinds of changes in the customizer and you have the ability to send a preview link to somebody else or one of your colleagues and customize it so they can collect feedback or get ideas or ask for – what – how they like the new design without the design actually going live. So it saves kind of in a – in a snapshot before it goes live to the public so that people can see all the design changes. I think this is a really neat idea. You also have the ability to go in and now it has the locking feature of WordPress. And so that means when – you’ve probably seen this if you have multiple people working on your WordPress site at one time.

And it's normally only been for the posts in pages area of your website – that if somebody was in a post then if somebody else tries to come that same post in the editor, then it's gonna say so and so is in the post. Would you like to take over or wait or go back or – it has a couple options there and now that has the same thing in the customizer. So two people can't be in the customizer all at the same time and I don't know if that's specific to the – just the customizer itself or like in the widgets – like only one person can be in the widgets at a time. Not exactly sure – I don't have like somebody to test with very easily since I'm the only person. I'm running things over here at YourWebsiteEngineer.com, so

I'm not exactly sure where that cut off is. If it's – if one person is in the customizer, no one else can be in the customizer or is it – if you’re in a specific widget or specific menu is that – is it more granular than that? So that would be something that you want to check out. But that is the design mock guards that have been added in 4.9.

Another thing that has been added to WordPress 4.9 is a prompt to protect your work. And so if you have – maybe walked away from your desk without saving – like that's never happened to anyone, now when you return WordPress will politely ask you if you have – if you would like to save your changes that are unsaved. So it's got some sort of tiny mechanism in there, if it sees so much inactivity then it's going to prompt you to save your work. So that's really cool. WordPress 4.9 has added some enhancements to code which is really nice as well. So now it has syntax highlighting in error checking.

And so if have you ever run into this problem – I just ran into it this past week, where I couldn't figure out why something in the CSS wasn't working and I ended up – it worked out that I was – I was making some changes to one of the widgets and when I copied and pasted the widget from my test site to my live site, I had an extra tag in there and I wasn’t really paying attention. I saved and then I started looking in the footer part of my website was all wonky and I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. Well I went into the custom HTML widgets and it was able to – it pinpointed and let me know that there were some error in my code and it had a little highlight there next that extra tag. I removed the tag and everything was all fine in the world. So, that was really – really nice.

And it has prompted me before when I was working with – in the widgets area to change all of my just custom text widgets to the custom HTML blocks. And then that way it can parse through the information there. So you haven’t been done that – if you updated to 4.9 and you have text blocks that are just a bunch of HTML codes pasted in, you want to change those over to a custom HTML widget and that's pretty simple. You just drag in or add the custom HTML widget and then you can copy and paste all of the information that was in the text widget into the HTML widget. So that's pretty easy and an action item that you could take forward this week.

Another great feature built into WordPress 4.9 is a safety for a – for your Sandbox. It's going to help you get away from that white screen of death and what that white screen of death is – is that screen when you make some changes to a theme or a plugin right from within the WordPress dashboard and then you save and maybe you didn't for – remember to put a semicolon at the end of a PHP statement or maybe you put PHP inside of PHP or you’ve got double PHP tags or something goofy like that, that would cause an error and normally white screen your site and then you can't login and just cause all kinds of issues. Now with WordPress 4.9, it will warn you about saving an error and so you can sleep better at night knowing that you can't white screen of death your website anymore.

It also put in a little warning that says potential danger and so it'll politely warn you that there is a dangerous – it's dangerous practice to edit things right in the WordPress dashboard. And so you'll want to – that's just a notification in there, so if you don't know what you're doing and you're in that area and you wanted to – it's going to let you know like, “Hey this probably isn't the best place to be. Danger ahead.” So that is something built into 4.9 as well.

There's been – there have been some updates to widgets. So there's a new gallery widget and so this is just a small improvement to be made with media changes that was in 4.8. But now you can add a gallery via a widget which is really nice and then if you want to add media next to your text widget, you can embed images, videos, and audio directly in the widget with your text with the simple but useful add menu button – or add media button. So that's built into the customizer as well. There's been some work on site building improvements in WordPress 4.9. There's a feature that has more – that's built for more reliable theme switching. So when you switch themes, widgets can sometimes just move location.

WordPress 4.9 now has a more persistent menu and widget placement so when you decide it's time for new themes – so if your work on a new theme and you rearrange your plugins and your menus and then you go back to your old theme and then you go back and forth a few times – while you're fixing or you're working on it, WordPress now is going to remember what menu items you set where and where your widgets are.

You can also, in the customizer, find and preview the perfect theme. So now you can search and browse over the 2600 themes in the WordPress repository before deploying changes to your site. What's more you can speed your search with filters for subjects and features and layouts. So you can search through all the themes on the WordPress repository. You can preview them in the customizer and you can see what that – your website’s going to look like. You can work on it. You can customize it. You can add menus and widgets and do all of the things and then if you want that change your live later – if you just want to save it as a draft, you can and your website will remain unchanged for the viewing public.

And something else that's been built into WordPress 4.9 is the – is a clear UI or clear user interface for creating a menu that's been in one of the main points on how to build a menu and where do I sign in and all that stuff? Now that's been built into a smoother creation process and there's a new text and new documentation instructions on how to set it up a little bit better. And like every other WordPress release, there are some things in tools in there for developers. They've improved the customizer JavaScript API. They've made Codemirror available for use in your themes and plugins. This is a new code editing library and that's built in now for your themes and plugins.

They've upgraded MediaElement.js to version 4.2.6. This removed some of the dependencies on jQuery and approves accessibility and modernizes the UI. And they fixed the roles in compatibilities in WordPress as well. It now – introduced a granular menu instrument of plugins and translation files. And in addition the sites which in-process in a multi-site has been fine tuned in a way that took four available rolls and compatibilities for more reliable and a coherent way. So some of those roles I give you are a editor or a subscriber and author. Now those roles are defined just a little bit better. So those are a few things on the developer side of things that have changed in WordPress 4.9.

The squad – the squad was released – these – this is the team that worked on WordPress – was led by Mel Choyce and Weston Ruter and they had 443 contributors with props in this release. That is a lot – a lot – a lot. I believe that's the most. And in this specific release there was 185 contributors that had contributed for the very first time. That is a very – very powerful in WordPress. It's very powerful for the communities see this many people – 185 brand new people that have fixed some sort bug or they've – maybe they found a bug and they’ve talked about or maybe they proposed a solution and somebody wrote the code for. Whatever the case may be, they got props in WordPress 4.9. The list is tremendous and the WordPress 4.9 was also fully translated into 43 languages at release time and more on the way as well.

So that is all about WordPress 4.9. If you haven't updated your site this week I highly – highly recommended doing that because of all of these great improvements and I recommend spending more time in the customizer. This is one of the sections that gets overlooked a lot because it's not like the rest of the WordPress dashboard and you can really gloss over that appearance and customize section. But it is a really fast and it’s really snappy. I really enjoy using it because now you – with widgets, like you can – you can make changes to widgets. You could automatically see them.

Anything that used in the customizer, there's a live preview on the – on the right hand side and that was perfect when I was debugging the issue on YourWebsiteEngineer.com. And I ended up – I found the tag. I removed it. I didn't even have to save – like it just – it – I erased the five characters, it got rid of it, and then all of a sudden the page refreshed and then I saw that I had fixed the change. Then I could publish it and save it and it was – it was awesome. It was really cool. So if you got to update menus or anything that you need to do that’s kind of a visual type thing or a customization inside of the theme itself, a lot of themes are building in their settings into the customizers as well.

This is – this is where the future is and I say this because we've been building on this quite a while. It's been a little while since we’ve got some new updates to customizer and it just feels so much snappier and so much like a better experience than we've had before.

So that's WordPress 4.9 and if you are in the states and are celebrating Thanksgiving, I just want to say happy Thanksgiving to you. I'm so thankful for you and – that's taking time this week to listen to the podcast, to comment, to subscribe, to share this with your friends and just thankful for being able to use this free software and do so many amazing incredible things. I'm so excited to learn and tinker all along – like just going to WordCamp and just being inspired there. Going to WordCamp – we’re going to WordCamp Nashville next week or the WordCamp U.S. in Nashville. And I’m just excited to meet more people in the community and hang out and just spend time in the – in the WordPress space.

If you're coming to WordCamp U.S. in just a couple weeks, let me know. I'd love to meet you in person and hang out and I'll be there. I'm a volunteer and hanging out all the – all throughout the weekend. And so send me a message through the contact form on YourWebsiteEngineer.com or you can send me a tweet @DustinHartzler. And that's all I got for you this week. Next week we'll talk about more WordPress. Take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.