WordPress 4.9 – Major Customizer Improvements, Code Checking, and More! 🎉

WordPress 4.9 – Press Avenue

WordPress 4.9 is here, that means its time to backup your website and update to WordPress 4.9 which will include updates to your themes, and plugins as well. WordPress 4.9 will smooth your design workflow and keep you safe from coding errors.

The highlights of the WordPress 4.9

Great stuff in this release! WordPress is fine-tuning the experience overall. Automatic is also pitching for help at the end of the about section to help with Gutenberg which doesn’t appear to be going away. Long live Beaver Builder!

Customizer Workflow Improved

• Draft and Schedule Site Design Customizations (this is awesome)
  Yes, you read that right. Just like you can draft and revise posts and schedule them to go live on the date and time you choose, you can now tinker with your site’s design and schedule those design changes to go live as you please.
• Collaborate with Design Preview Links
  Need to get some feedback on proposed site design changes? WordPress 4.9 gives you a preview link you can send to your team and customers so that you can collect and integrate feedback before you schedule the changes to go live. Can we say collaboration++?
• Design Locking To Guard Your Changes
  Ever encounter a scenario where two designers walk into a project and designer A overrides designer B’s beautiful changes? WordPress 4.9’s design lock feature (similar to post locking) secures your draft design so that no one can make changes to it or erase all your hard work.
• A Prompt to Protect Your Work
  Have you ever been lured away from your desk before you saved your new draft design? Fear not, when you return, WordPress 4.9 will politely ask whether or not you’d like to save your unsaved changes.

Coding Enhancements

• Syntax Highlighting and Error Checking? (Finally)
  Yes, Please! You’ve got a display problem but can’t quite figure out exactly what went wrong in the CSS you lovingly wrote. With syntax highlighting and error checking for CSS editing and the Custom HTML widget introduced in WordPress 4.8.1, you’ll pinpoint coding errors quickly. Practically guaranteed to help you scan code more easily and suss out and fix code errors quickly.
• Sandbox for Safety
  The dreaded white screen of death. You’ll avoid it when working on themes and plugin code because WordPress 4.9 will warn you about saving an error. You’ll sleep better at night and so will your customers.
• Warning: Potential Danger Ahead! (Cowboy coders beware)
  When you edit themes and plugins directly, WordPress 4.9 will politely warn you that this is a dangerous practice. It will recommend that you backup your files before saving, so they don’t get overwritten by the next update. Take the safe route: your future self will thank you. Your team and customers will thank you.

Even More Widget Updates

• The New Gallery Widget
  An incremental improvement to the media changes hatched in WordPress 4.8, you can now add a gallery via a widget. Yes!
• Press a Button, Add Media
  Want to add media to your text widget? Embed images, video, and audio directly into the widget along with your text, with our simple but useful Add Media button. Woo!

Site Building Improvements

• More Reliable Theme Switching
  When you switch themes, widgets sometimes think they can just up and move location. Improvements in WordPress 4.9 offer more persistent menu and widget placement when you decide it’s time for a new theme. Additionally, you can preview installed themes or download, install, and preview new themes right. Nothing says handy like being able to preview before you deploy.
• Better Menu Instructions = Less Confusion
  Were you confused by the steps to create a new menu? Perhaps no longer! We’ve ironed out the UX for a smoother menu creation process. The newly updated copy will guide you.

The details of WordPress 4.9 are here https://codex.wordpress.org/Version_4.9