On September 4, 2014, WordPress 4.0 “Benny,” named for jazz musician Benny Goodman, was released to the public.
Highlights of WordPress 4.0
Manage your media and embedded content with style
- Explore your uploads in a beautiful, endless grid
- WordPress 4.0 offers a new details preview makes viewing and editing any amount of media in sequence a snap.
The content-editing experience is better than ever with WordPress 4.0
- The visual editor in WordPress 4.0 now expands to fit your content
- A fixed toolbar in the editor when you scroll
- Embeddable content previews right in the visual editor
Better workflow for finding and installing plugins
- WordPress 4.0 has a new grid view adds some visual flair to finding and installing plugins, bringing relevant plugin info front and center
For Developers
- Customizer Panels API
- Updated external libraries
- Better flexibility for WP_Query ORDER BY
What’s New in WordPress 4.0
General features in WordPress 4.0
- Featured image previews now support .bmp files
- Featured Image meta box is now hidden for contributors lacking upload capabilities
- New supported oEmbed providers: CollegeHumor, Issuu, Mixcloud, YouTube playlists, TED talks
- WordPress 4.0 allows you to install WordPress in your language
- Streamlined Language management right from the dashboard
Posts in WordPress 4.0
- Display embed previews for audio/visual URLs in Visual editor content box.
- Page scrolling now scrolls post content box.
- Edit Post/Page menu bar sticks to top of content box when scrolling (Visual and Text editor).
- Color picker was re-added to the Visual editor
WordPress Media
- Add Media Grid view option (default) for Media Library
- Add “Bulk Select” button to Media Grid view to delete multiple items
- Add oEmbed support for TED talks, Mixcloud, CollegeHumor.com, Issuu
- Expand oEmbed support to include YouTube playlist URLs and Polldaddy’s short URL format
- Remove Viddler oEmbed support
- Update SlideShare oEmbed regex
- Improved media experience on small screen sizes (embedded videos are now responsive)
- Native video and audio shortcodes now support Flash playback looping
Plugins
- Display plugins list as grid, with thumbnails, on Add New screen.
- Add popup window with plugin details (displays info from plugin’s directory page).
- Add “Beta Testing” tab to Plugins screen for new features-as-plugins.
Accessibility
- Improved keyboard accessibility in the Add Media panel
- Improved screen-reader support for Customizer sections
- Makes links in help tabs keyboard accessible
- Improvements for screen-readers when managing widgets in the Customizer
Comments
- Comments in trash can now be marked as spam.
Installing WordPress Process
- Add language select menu as first Installation screen (skipped for localized installs)
Multisite
- mp4 file extension was added to allowed upload file types
