WordPress 4.3, which is due next month, has just released its Beta 1 version with a glimpse of several upcoming new features.
While the new features mostly become a topic of wide discussion amongst the developers’ community, I want to cover them from the perspective of what general users can expect in upcoming WordPress 4.3.
August 19th Update: WordPress 4.3 was released yesterday and is now available to update from your dashboard. You might want to follow our latest article – WordPress 4.3 – Complete Guide to New Features and Changes.
The announcement for WordPress 4.3 Beta 1 includes changes and new features in areas including Menus, Site Icon, Better passwords, Editor Improvements, and list view improvements. I have further discussed the major changes and new features in WordPress 4.3 below;
1. Menus management added to Customizer
Although highly debated amongst the developers’ community, WordPress customizer has now included options to manage Menus. You can add new Menu, Menu items, and define Menu areas all from the font-end customizer with a live preview of your changes.
To me, It works all perfectly but I think it’s not something that would hugely improve setup process of a website. If this feature really gets positive feedback from overall users will be interesting to see.
2. Site Icon Feature
The site icon feature will allow you to manage your website’s favicon and app icon as seen on several devices from within the admin settings area.
This is something exciting to me as I use the Jetpack’s site icon feature on all of my websites. It’s indeed good to see this being included as a core feature.
Many users also use other popular favicon plugins to achieve this and thus this core feature will certainly be useful to many of them.
The site icon feature is under Settings > General and this is what it looks like once you have uploaded your icon.
There are options to update site icon and remove site icon once you have defined your icon.
3. Better password Changes
Several improvements are included in passwords to make them more secure. As reported by Mark Jaquith, the group has mainly introduced changes in the following areas.
- Re-work password choosing/changing UI (Changes to enable users choose strong password with improved user interface)
- No manual or e-mailed passwords for creating other users (WordPress will automatically generate a password and send it to the user you have added with a link to view or reset the password.)
- Upon password reset, generate a new password, and fill it in (To discourage selecting weak passwords, WordPress will automatically fill in a random secure password, providing you with the ability to change it).
- Password reset links should expire (Password reset links will expire after certain time in addition to being one-use.)
- Users should be notified of password/e-mail changes (Notification for password changes; and email changes notification to sent to existing email.)
Passwords can be changed from your profile settings and this is what the new settings look like.
4. Editor Improvements
The new editor improvements now support certain formats such as * automatically for a list and others that are common shortcuts for formatting. Few changes include,
- Â * and – transforming into unordered lists
- 1. and 1) transformed into ordered lists,
- Â > for blockquotes
- one to six number signs (#) for headings
I tested using the changes typing the characters and it seem to work perfectly.
These automatic changes can be really useful to speed up the process of formatting a post.
5. List view Improvements for Small Screen
List view changes across the dashboard now enable you to see all columns by simply toggling it. This can be really helpful for users on small screen devices.
As mobile continues to grow, changes as such are necessary to create a seamless user experience across screens and devices.
Apart from the above changes and features, there are also few other changes specifically targeted to developers, which can be seen on this post.
The beta 1 version of WordPress 4.3 can be downloaded from WordPress.org if you are interested in trying new features before the release of a stable version. You can certainly help the development team by testing the beta software. Please make sure you only try it on test websites though.
WordPress is continuously evolving and it’s indeed exciting to see all these upcoming new features in WordPress 4.3.
Which feature or changes do you like the most?
