WordPress 4.0 has been released! This release brings with it a stunning new gallery-like grid view for your media library, more streamlined ways of interacting with your media, a new editor which displays embeds inline and expands as you write with a toolbar which follows as you scroll down, a much more visual plugin directory, and hundreds of other behind the scenes fixes and improvements.
If you aren’t a fan of the new Media Library grid view, don’t worry, you can switch back to the old list view via a toggle near the top-left of the Media Library.
275 volunteers contributed to this release, led by Helen Hou-Sandí. At the time of writing this, WordPress 4.0 has been out for only 2 hours and has already been downloaded 104,571 times!
All users can now safely update from Dashboard -> Updates or download and update manually, though you should probably backup first just in case, unless you’re already using VaultPress, which you really should be.
If you’re a WordPress.com blogger, you have nothing to worry about, as you’ve technically been running WordPress 4.0 for a while now.
Comments
4 responses to “WordPress 4.0 Released”
Good on making the Media Library easier to use and find things in it. Finally having some sort ability makes finding images easier (sort of depends on how they were captioned etc.) – have used the new sort feature when updating some older Posts.
Boo Hiss on the Blue Death Editor, sucks big time, I still use the Classic Editor, it works and is fast. The Blue Death Editor developers should be take out behind the woodshed and dumped in the outhouse, sorry but Blue Death is very bad.
Well, by “Blue Death Editor” I assume you mean the one rolled out over at WordPress.com. That’s very different from WordPress.org and not at all related to the release of WordPress 4.0. Different product, different people.
Yes “Blue Death” is the one some call Beep Beep or whatever on WordPress.com – very bad
So maybe the .ORG folks dodged a bullet. I don’t have a .ORG install so I can’t look at your editor – so maybe some common sense did prevail – good for the .ORG folks
For the most part, what happens in that blue area of WordPress.com is strictly WordPress.com-only. It can certainly interact with your WordPress.org blogs if you have Jetpack installed, but it’s much more of an optional “only if you want to” kind of thing.
There are no “bullets” to dodge really, as the volunteer developer community behind WordPress.org would have to want to invest time in bringing something like that into core.
WordPress.org users have been enjoying the classic /wp-admin/ editor (and sometimes modifying it with plugins as desired) since the beginning. 🙂