WordPress 4.5 – Field Guide & updates that are coming soon

WordPress 4.5 Field Guide was first posted on https://make.wordpress.org/core/2016/03/30/wordpress-4-5-field-guide/ but is worth a look! We are super excited for WordPress 4.5 so check out the details below. Also WordPress 4.5 is slated for a April 12, 2016 release so stay tuned!

WordPress 4.5 is the next major version of WordPress and with it come some bang bang changes. This guide will describe many of the developer-focused changes to help you test your themes, plugins, and sites. So grab a☕️ ,?,?, or ? and get ready for what’s coming soon.

JavaScript! and CSS!

Multiple external libraries have been updated with the two that require your attention being Backbone and Underscore. There were some‼️ breaking changes ‼️ with these two libraries, so make sure to test your code if you use either of these.  jQuery and jQuery Migrate have also been updated, please test with the unminified versions in order to ensure future compatibility with WordPress.

The script loader has been updated with three big changes. The build process no longer creates wp-admin.min.css, wp_add_inline_script() joins the family of functions, and better support for multigenerational dependencies is included.

Term Edit Page! –‼️ Backward Incompatible change‼️

The term edit screen has been separated out from the term list screen. This brings greater consistency to how the admin generates screens for terms and posts but at the cost of the need to change how you register scripts and how you detect that you are on a term edit screen.

Live Preview: Faster, Extensible, More Features!

Live Preview (also known as “The Customizer”) once again has received attention this release with the addition of new controls, some performance improvements that require your attention to implement, and a two new user-facing features.

Setting-less Controls, Device Previews, and Selective Refresh are the three biggest changes you’ll find. Setting-less controls make it easier for you to implement complex interfaces. Device Preview is a user facing feature that allows users to adjust the preview to match the screens on various devices.  This feature includes filters to change the devices users can choose. Selective Refresh allows for changes to appear quicker inside the preview, and you can do so with less code than before. Theme authors need to make changes to take advantage of selective refresh. Luckily, the change will generally result in fewer lines of code needed overall ( more ? than ? ).

One area that selective refresh helps live preview function faster is with widgets.

‼️ If you offer sidebars or a widget in your theme or plugin, please update your code to implement selective refresh. Both themes and widgets need to indicate support, so please update your code accordingly.

The final change to Live Preview involves a control for a new theme feature, and that is Custom Theme Logos.

Custom Theme Logos!

Themes can now offer support for custom logos. Custom Logos add an additional way for users to customize their site and theme developers can customize how custom logos are displayed.

Image Performance!

Following up on the introduction of responsive images in WordPress 4.4, WordPress 4.5 is making changes toimprove image performance including improved compression settings and smarter handling of image metadata.

Embed Templates! (and other iterations)

Iterating on embeds has led to the ability to better customize embeds by adding new templates to the template hierarchy for embeds. Embeds have also had some performance improvements for autodiscovery, the ability to embed the front page of a site, and changes to the iframe of embedded content.

Comments Component!

The comments component has a few user-facing changes to make comments easier to moderate. For developers, the most notable change is the ability to adjust field lengths for your custom database schema. Additionally, the rel=nofollow attribute and value pair will no longer be added to relative or same domain links within comment_content.

Multisite!

Multisite once again has seen changes with the addition of new filters around site and user creation, and aWP_Site object.

And more!

Overall, 372 bugs have been marked as fixed in WordPress 4.5 (so far). There are also dozens of new hooks and dozens of hooks that have received additional parameters. It’s entirely possible that one or more has caused a regression, so please make sure to test your code deeply and report any issues you find.

WordPress 4.5 Field Guide was first posted on https://make.wordpress.org/core/2016/03/30/wordpress-4-5-field-guide/ but is worth a look!