WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” is out today – here’s everything that’s new

This year’s last major WordPress release – WordPress 4.9 “Tipton”, was released today. The 4.x branch, which started in 2015 with WordPress 4.0 “Benny”, has evolved a lot over the past two years. One of the most important changes was the introduction of the Media Gallery – a centralized location where you can see all your images, audio and video files. The 4.x branch was also quite a journey for the post editor, which underwent a few major updates in earlier versions and was almost replaced in the latest releases.

But for now, we’ll focus on what WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” brings to the table. We’ve already published a detailed preview, based on the final beta version, but since this is the official release, let’s see what it has to offer.

Everything new and improved with WordPress 4.9

WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” is a huge release, even by the WordPress development team standards. It features more than 400 bug fixes, 181 enhancements, and 7 feature requests. In addition, 42 blessed tasks have been marked as closed.

New Widgets and Widget improvements

WordPress 4.9 will bring one new widget to the table – the Gallery widget. It does what the name says – it allows you to create a rudimentary gallery of 2 or more images.

This new widget follows the addition of the image, video and audio widgets in the previous version of WordPress.

If you are wondering what is the point of having all these different widgets when their functionality can be replicated with a bit of code in the Custom HTML widget, the reason is called Guttenberg. This is the new post editor that the WordPress team has been developing for some time now. It uses blocks to allow for the seamless creation of media-rich posts.

And these new widgets are basically proto-blocks.

While on the subject of widgets, there are also several updates for existing widgets:

• the text widget now supports shortcodes
• the text widget now also supports media, such as audio, video, images and galleries
• embeds are now officially supported by the text and video widgets
• better widget re-mapping when changing themes
• notifications for unsaved changes in the widgets when leaving a page

Code Editing improvements

For many years, code editing in WordPress was not an easy thing. The only tool we used to have at our disposal was a simple text editor. But this is finally about to change.

As of WordPress 4.9, the CodeMirror library will be integrated into the WordPress core. This means that we will be able to enjoy code highlighting, automatic code completion, code linting, syntax errors highlighting and more.

This new functionality will be available in the plugin and theme editors, as well as the Custom CSS section of the Customizer and Custom HTML widget.

And if you have never heard of CodeMirror, it’s the same library that powers Brackets.io, Bitbucket, Chrome’s DevTools, Codepen, Firefox Developer Tools, GitHub, JSFiddle and many others.

Customizer improvements

The Customizer is the interface the WordPress devs want you to use for every change regarding your theme. And to that end, it has grown to be more usable and more feature-rich with each new WordPress release.

With WordPress 4.9, users will be able to browse and change themes directly from the Customizer. This will apply both to the themes that you have already installed and to all the themes available in the WordPress.org theme repository.

And not only you can browse and set the chosen theme, you can also preview how it will work with your content directly from the Customizer.

Aside from the theme switching, the Customizer has also gained another important functionality – you can now save the changes that you make as drafts, with autosaves available. Also, you can schedule them for a specific date and time, just like you would with a blog post. And to top it off, you can now send live preview links for each draft, so that other people in your team can get acquainted with the changes and/or you can get their feedback.

The other major update to the Customizer is related to the site menus – building them and adding new pages to them. These are the two areas, which the WordPress devs identified as more problematic for users. To address this, the menu interface in the Customizer has been reworked. It now features improved clarity and usability.

Security updates

With the WordPress 4.9 release, the security focus is on social engineering attacks, where the attacker will try to change the email address associated with a given user account. When a change is made to a WordPress admin mail, the old mail will be notified of the change. This will allow users to quickly catch unauthorized changes.

There are also changes to the user roles. With the new version, users will now be granted access to enable or disable plugins or add and modify language files. These two changes will apply to both single and multi-site WordPress installations.

Press This leaves the WP Core

Press This, the little tool that allowed you to create posts from bits of content you found on the web is leaving the WordPress core. It will be available as a standalone plugin.

However, this does not mean that there will be no further development for Press This – the plugin is still being developed and anyone can check its current state on the project’s GitHub page.

And much more

These were the most important changes in WordPress 4.9. However, there are other, who albeit smaller, are nonetheless important:

• Screen reader improvements
• ME.js updates
• Customize and REST API updates
• PHP sandbox
• New global notification area
• Multiple multisite updates
• Complete PHP 7.2 compatibility

A list of all the changes and bug fixes is available here.