WordPress 4.7
6 December 2016
WordPress version 4.7 is now available (major release).
Upgrading to WordPress 4.7
WordPress 4.7 can be upgraded to (or installed) using any of Installatron's products. Use Installatron's optional Automatic Update feature to automatically apply WordPress updates as new versions are released, or use Installatron's Clone feature to duplicate an existing WordPress install to test the 4.7 upgrade prior to applying it live. Get started managing your WordPress installations with Installatron
What's New in WordPress 4.7
Highlights
- New Default Theme - Twenty Seventeen: It is an ambitious theme designed for business websites that focuses on a creative home page and an easy site setup experience for users.
- REST API Content Endpoints: API endpoints for WordPress content. WordPress 4.7 comes with REST API endpoints for posts, comments, terms, users, meta, and settings. Content endpoints provide machine-readable external access to your WordPress site with a clear, standards-driven interface, paving the way for new and innovative methods of interacting with your site.
The Finer Points
- Theme Starter Content: Starter Content is the theme-specific selections of content to help showcase a theme to users and serve as a starting point for further setup of new sites. The initial view of a theme with starter content will only happen for "fresh sites" - new installs that have not yet had any posts, pages, widgets, or customizer settings updated.
- Edit Shortcuts: Visible icons appear to show you which parts can be customized right there while live previewing. Click on a shortcut and get straight to editing, no decoding of widget area names or extra clicks needed. Paired with starter content, getting started with customizing your site is faster than ever.
- Video Headers: WordPress 4.7 extends the Custom Header feature to introduce support for video. Video headers play automatically, loop by default, and don't have sound. They work best when paired with an image, so they can progressively enhance the experience when video is supported.
- Smoother Nav Menu Building: Many primary navigation menus for sites contain links to the pages of your site. But what happens when you don't have any pages yet? Now you can add new pages while building nav menus instead of leaving the customizer and abandoning your changes. Once you've published your customizations, you'll have new pages ready for you to fill with content.
- Custom CSS: Sometimes you just need a few more visual tweaks to make your site perfect, or a plugin adds something that doesn't quite look right with your site. WordPress 4.7 allows you to instantly see changes while adding custom CSS to give your site that polish.
- User Admin Languages and Locale Switching: Users can select their preferred locale (language) when editing their profile. The back end will be displayed in the user's individual locale while the locale used on the front end equals the one set for the whole site.
- PDF Thumbnail Previews: Managing your document collection is easier with WordPress Version 4.7, which now shows preview thumbnails instead of a generic icon for PDFs in the media library.
For Developers
- Custom Bulk Actions: Simpler way to register bulk actions on list table screens (read more).
- Page Templates for Post Types: Add support for post type templates. By opening up the page template functionality to all post types, theme developers have even more flexibility with the WordPress template hierarchy.
- WP_Taxonomy: New WP_Taxonomy class provides methods to handle taxonomies. This changes the global $wp_taxonomies to an array of WP_Taxonomy objects.
- More Theme API Goodies: WordPress 4.7 includes new functions, hooks, and behavior for theme developers.
- WP_Hook: The code that lies beneath actions and filters has been overhauled. You likely aren't affected, but if you've done things to the $wp_filter global or experienced funky recursion bugs in the past, please take a moment to read the dev note and test your code.
- Customize Changesets: Browse your site and switch themes more seamlessly within the customizer, as your changes automatically persist in the background. Changesets also make exciting new features like starter content possible.
- Attributes for Resource Hints: You're now able to pass specific HTML attributes to these resource hints to make even better use of them.
- wp_list_sort() and WP_List_Util: WordPress 4.7 brings a few enhancements to handling object or array lists. A new function wp_list_sort() makes it easy to sort object or array lists by one or more of its elements' properties. A new WP_List_Util class was introduced as a central access point for handling lists.