WordPress update July 2016

The recent Glow Blogs release incorporated a new version of WordPress, this add features from both WordPress 4.4 and 4.5 to Glow blogs some of the highlights are listed below, taken from Version 4.4 « WordPress Codex and Version 4.5 « WordPress Codex

Features from 4.4

Responsive images:
WordPress now takes a smarter approach to displaying appropriate image sizes on any device, ensuring a perfect fit every time. You don’t need to do anything to your theme, it just works.

Embed your WordPress content:
Now you can embed your posts on other sites, even other WordPress sites. Simply drop a post URL into the editor and see an instant embed preview, complete with the title, excerpt, and featured image if you’ve set one. We’ll even include your site icon and links for comments and sharing.

For example I’ll paste in the url for a recent tip page from this site:

Follow Blogs from My Sites

  • New Theme – Twenty Sixteen
    Modern take on the classic blog design
    Flexible header and fun color schemes will make your content shine
    Mobile-first and responsive

Features from 4.5

Customizer Improvement
Device Previewer Buttons in the customizer controls footer shows how your site looks in mobile, tablet, and desktop contexts before making changes to its appearance. Theme installer previewer has the same function.

screenshot of mobile view in customiser

Visual Editor Improvement
Inline Link Editing enables users to direct URL input without switching to modal dialog.

gif of adding links in the visual editor

Version 4.5 adds new shortcuts in Visual Editor.

  • Use `your code` to transform my code
  • Use --- to transform <hr /> create a rule

Comment Refinement
Refreshed Moderate Comment Screen has formatted comment content for display, navigation via a text link, updated message styles and so on. The comment form now enforce the maximum length of each field.

Optimization of Image Generation
Image sizes are generated more efficiently and remove unneeded meta, while still including color profiles in Imagick, for reduced sizes of up to 50% with near identical visual quality.

2 thoughts on “WordPress update July 2016”

  1. Apologies, I cannot find a suitable place to ask this question – is it possible to embed Google Analytics into my Glow site? I can’t find how to access the header.php code so that I can embed the Google tracker code etc.

    Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

    1. Hi Eleanor,
      I am afraid you cannot add Analytics to your blog. Being a WordPress multisite you have no access to the blogs php files. Adding stats to Glow blogs is in our backlog but we don’t have an estimate of when it will arrive.

      Although hit counters fall far short of providing analytics some Glow Blogs users find them useful. Again there are some caveats please see:
      Adding a Hit Counter | Glow Blog Help
      for details.

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