WordPress 3.9 is currently in its third beta and, according to the company, is scheduled to be officially released to all users on April 16th.
If your blog or website runs on WordPress, updating to the latest version is always recommended. With that being the case, we wanted to give you a brief overview of some of the main new features you can expect to see when version 3.9 comes out next week.
Live Theme Previews
Making a change to your WordPress theme, saving it, and then refreshing your browser window to view the changes is a thing of the past. Now you can see what everything looks like before it goes live. Under the Appearance > Themes > Customize page in the admin system you can now “Live Preview” themes.
You can also tweak all customizable assets in your theme, like widgets, while in Live Preview mode. While in Live Preview mode you also have the ability to upload, crop, and manage header images, and see how the image looks with the rest of your site before going live with it.
A Slew of New Image-Related Features
Drag and Drop Images
Now you can simply drag and drop images into the visual editor section while you’re writing a post, WordPress will automatically upload that media to your site. This is sure to be a tremendous time saver, especially if you use a lot of images in your posts.
Better Image Editing
Edit images directly in the visual editor while working on your post. No more having to leave the page and open up the image editing controls.
Live Preview Of Photo Galleries
Before, when you added a photo gallery to your post, all you saw was a placeholder box indicating where the photo gallery would be. Now you get a live preview of photo galleries while editing your post, so you can see how they will actually look on your site when published.
I’m excited for this update as it offers a lot of new features designed to make lives easier for those who use WordPress on a regular basis. There are also some new features available for WordPress developers as well. For a full list of new features, including screenshots, please visit WPBeginner.
