What’s New in WordPress 4.5 — Coleman

WordPress has released a major update on April, 12 2016. Version 4.5 was dubbed as “Coleman” in recognition of the late great jazz saxophone player Coleman Hawkins. You can download it or update it directly from your dashboard or download it from WordPress.org.

This release has some exciting features along with the typical list of bug fixes and updates. Coleman aims to streamline workflow with added improvements for editing and customizing in WordPress. New features include…

• Inline linking from the editor
• Custom logo uploading from the customizer
• Script loader improvements
• Formatting shortcodes
• Custom logo (theme must support this)
• Selective refresh
• Better embed templates

New and Improved WordPress 4.5

Managing content just got a little bit better. WordPress 4.5 has some nice new features to make editing easier. This way you can focus on producing high quality content while WordPress takes care of all the digital jazz. Below we give you a rundown on what’s new.

Custom Logos

One of the most long awaited features involves giving theme developers a way to include support for logos. The new Theme Logo feature in Coleman does just that. Developers now have a standard way to offer custom logo support in their themes.

This way user’s can easily upload logos and find them without any trouble. I like this new feature because it makes things much easier. Uploading and optimizing a logo now works much like header images do in WordPress.

Make sure that your theme supports this feature and back up your files before you try it out. Once you have WordPress 4.5 installed you can start using custom logos. Simply navigate to Appearance > Customize > Site Identity and upload your image.

Inline Link Editing Linking

I really like this feature. It’s annoying to lose momentum when you are writing, especially when you are on a hot streak. The less time I have to spend doing things like pasting in links or formatting text, the better.

This new method of editing links from inside your post/page is much less distracting than the old way. Before a modal window would pop up. Now a much less intrusive, minimal window comes up. This keeps me focused on the content and makes internal linking much faster. It’s a small improvement but it makes a big difference in the UX.

Formatting Shortcuts

If you like to format shortcuts for your lists and headings than you will like this. Shortcuts are now even more powerful, with horizontal lines and <code>.

Better Previews for Icons

The release of WordPress 4.4 marked the introduction of Site Icons. This feature allows users to set a custom favicon and application icon for their site. WordPress 4.5 includes an improved site icon preview. When you are uploading or editing your image you will now see a preview under the site identity panel. This is a small but helpful improvement.

Live Responsive Preview in Customizer

This is another cool frontend feature that developers can make good use of. Make sure your site looks perfect on any sized screen. With the new responsive preview feature you can see what your website will look like on mobile phones, desktops in the customizer. Just click the device icon to switch between previews. This gives you a basic idea of how your site will look.

Login with Email

WordPress made the login process slightly more convenient as well. There are plenty of online services like Twitter, Facebook and more that let you login with your user name or your email address. I like this feature because it’s easy for people to forget their usernames, but it’s much less likely that people will forget their email address.

Now you can use your email or username to log into WordPress 4.5. If you had a plugin that would allow users to login with their email, you no longer need it.

Under the Hood

Here’s a short list of some of the biggest changes to the WordPress core with the release of Coleman.

Smart Image Resizing — Loading time for images is faster. Dynamically generated images now load 50% faster without any discernable loss in quality. This is a great performance booster.

Selective Refresh — Selective refresh for nav menus was introduced in WordPress 4.3 and now it’s implemented in the customizer. You can render specific parts of the preview without having to rewrite PHP or JavaScript code.

Enhanced Script Loader — Better support for script loaders allow more code to be added to registered scripts. With the wp_add_inline_script()

Before, dependencies of registered scripts were moved to the header – even if the script was loaded in the footer.

Better Embed Templates — There were a couple minor improvements to the <iframe> embed code. The embed templates can now be easily overridden by the theme template.

JavaScript Library Updates — Bundled JavaScript Library Updates include jQuery 1.12.3, jQuery Migrate 1.4.0, Backbone 1.2.3, and Underscore 1.8.3

This major update has some fancy new frontend features and plenty of bug fixes. For a more comprehensive list of all the changes in 4.5, check out the this WordPress.org post. Remember to check with your theme author’s to make sure everything is up to date and ensure your site won’t break.