The new features in WordPress 4.8 “Evans”

2017’s first major WordPress release – 4.8, has been released today. Nicknamed “Evans” after William John Evans – a popular, self-taught modern jazz pianist, it brings several new features to both the backend and the frontend.

You can download WordPress 4.8 “Evans” today from your WordPress admin area or from the WordPress download page.

WordPress 4.8 “Evans” doesn’t bring anything revolutionary to the table. Instead, it aims to enhance the overall user experience and to allow users to improve their WordPress sites by making small tweaks here and there.

We’ve already done a preview of WordPress 4.8‘s beta version. Here is a full list of the new features in WordPress 4.8 “Evans”.

New Media Widgets

There are four new media widgets – an audio widget, a video widget, a text widget and an image widget. The first three are pretty straightforward to use – you just select the desired media and it will be ‘loaded’ accordingly. The default audio and video players will be used for playing audio and video files.

The text widget features a limited TinyMCE editor, which will allow you to format your text much more quickly. You will no longer have to use HTML tags for formatting purposes. You can use the regular text editor if you want to edit your code directly.

Link Boundaries

Link boundaries may sound limiting, but it is quite the opposite. In WordPress 4.8, the editor ‘detects’ when the user wants to edit a link and the text after that link.

Now, when you select a given link, it will be highlighted in light blue. If you type something in the highlighted area, that text will instantly become part of the link itself. If you type something outside it, that text will be just text.

WordPress events in the dashboard

The WordPress community is one of the largest out there. WordPress Meetups and WordCamps are being organized all over the world. With WordPress 4.8, even if you don’t follow your local WordPress community, the new WordPress Events and News widget in the admin dashboard will notify you about official WordPress events happening near you, as well as about important WordPress news.

The widget will use your IP to determine your location so as to show you notifications about local events, but you can also manually enter a new location to see if anything is happening there.

New APIs, CSS updates and more in WordPress 4.8

Just like any new version, WordPress 4.8 brings several updates and bug fixes:

• New media widgets API
• Text-editor Java Script API
• Customizer Width Variable
• Multisite Updates
• No core support for WMV and WMA files
• More accessible admin panel headings

If you what to dig deeper, here is a full list of the bug fixes and enhancements in WordPress 4.8 “Evans”.