WordPress 4.7, named “Vaughan” in honour of legendary jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan was released to public yesterday. While WordPress Codex brings full release notes, I will elaborate on few exciting features that typical WordPress users would appreciate most.
Starter content for themes
Everyone who ever tried to recreate a website that looks like a demo of a chosen theme knows that the “exercise” can often be difficult and time consuming. To overcome the problem, WordPress 4.7 introduces the concept of “starter content” for themes. You can simply import / apply the starter content to better preview a theme or use selected starter content parts as a starting point for your website.
Live preview for custom CSS
Of course, there are many ways to add CSS to your website that range from proper developer implementation through WordPress themes to multitude of plugins targeted to less technical users. What’s unique to WordPress 4.7 custom CSS feature is it’s live preview! And that’s perfect when you just need to make few visual tweaks and instantly see how your changes affect your site. The live preview allows you to work quickly without page refreshes slowing you down.
Dashboard language choice for each back-end user
It’s a common practice that back-end systems can be setup in a different language. But WordPress 4.7 goes a step further and allows every back-end user to independantly from others choose their preferred language for entire back-end! If a user didn’t specify a locale, the site’s default locale is used as a fallback. Simply add more languages to your site and a user language option will show up in user’s profile. Oh, and you can already choose from 164 available language packs.
Continuous improvements for WP REST API
WP REST API 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 sites through plugins, themes, apps, and beyond. WordPress stresses the importance of REST API architecture and continues on improving it with each release, pawing the way for truly open and connected web.