The most awaited release of the year, WordPress 4.8 is finally here. WordPress.org made available the newest version of WordPress yesterday. The newest WordPress version is named as WordPress 4.8 “Evans” as a tribute to legendary William John “Bill” Evans, an American pianist. WordPress 4.8 “Evans” is now available for download on your WordPress dashboard. There is an abundance of new features added and improvements made for users to work with WordPress in a completely hassle-free way.
The WordPress 4.8 release comes with the features we saw in the Betas and Release Candidates. We’ve already discussed all of those in our previous posts.
This time around, WordPress has definitely taken a huge leap with the improvements: link improvements, three new media widgets covering images, audio, and video, an updated text widget that supports visual editing, and an upgraded news section in your dashboard that bring all the nearby and upcoming WordPress events.
Let’s have a look at all of these new and improved features and more in detail.
Sometimes, updating or editing a link correctly can come with so much difficulty and this can really be frustrating. With Link Boundaries, a great new feature in WordPress 4.8, the process can be done so easily and your links will also work properly. Link boundaries provide a visual representation of where a link begins and ends. This will prevent from adding unnecessary text to the beginning or end of a link.
The newest version of WordPress includes three new widgets: Image Widget, Video and Audio Widget, and Rich Text Widget. All of these three widgets make it easier to display images, video, or audio without using HTML. Rich Text Widget gives you the power to add a widget anywhere and format away.
Moreover, users will now be able to see all the nearby WordPress events from their dashboard. The widget will try to automatically guess your location and display meetups and WordCamps that are nearby. You can also change your location by clicking the Pencil button.
Similarly, in WordPress 4.8, the Customer Sidebar is responsive. In previous versions of WordPress, the Customer Sidebar had a maximum width of 300 pixels but this time, its width will automatically increase based on the size of the screen up to a maximum of 600 pixels.
Furthermore, the admin pages are more accessible now. The headers on admin screen are now separate elements making it easier for assistive technologies to help people navigate pages.
The WordPress 4.8 Release was led by Matt Mullenweg and Jeff Paul. They have been completely immersed in the development and have done a commendable job leading the team. There 346 are contributors with props in this release with 106 of them contributing for the first time.
With so many new and improved things this time, WordPress 4.8 release comes with WordPress fully translated into 38 languages with more on the way.
You can read our previous posts on what’s new in WordPress 4.8, the field guide, Beta 1 and Beta 2 as well as the Release Candidate and Release Candidate 2.
Have you updated to WordPress 4.8 yet? Did this newest version of WordPress fulfill all your expectation? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments.