As promised, we saw the arrival of WordPress 4.5 in April, so now we’ve had a couple of weeks to get to grips with the new version we wanted to share details of the new features you can enjoy in WordPress 4.5.
Named to honour Coleman Hawkins, the legendary jazz musician, WordPress 4.5 had a total of 298 contributors – making it one of the biggest releases ever.
So, what’s new in WordPress 4.5?
First of all, users now have the ability to add a site logo in the Customiser. Just head to ‘Site Identity’ and you’ll be able to add a logo that will be used as a browser and app icon logo for your site. Pretty nifty!
For those who write a lot of their website content directly in WordPress, a number of new shortcuts have been added that will make life a lot easier for you. A couple of the shortcuts include a backtick that inserts code and a dash for a horizontal rule.
The new responsive preview display is one of the additions that people are most excited about, and for good reason. When using the Customiser to tweak the look of your WordPress site you can now preview your site on different screen sizes and devices to check how it will look when you set it live. It’s a definite time saver and a lot more convenient than using a third party extension.
Users can now use either your username or email address to log into WordPress – very handy for those who are prone to forgetting usernames!
Comment moderation has been improved, allowing comments to be viewed in an editor, as well as improvements to image optimisation, meaning image files can be 50% smaller without sacrificing image quality.
For those who want to peek under the hood, there are further details about developer-focused changes in the WordPress 4.5 field guide.