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WordPress 3.9 Arrives!

Last week saw the arrival of the hugely-anticipated WordPress 3.9, which boasts a wealth of brand new features, and upgrades to some old favourites.

It’s clear that the developers of this latest release have focused on improving visual elements, giving users a cleaner and more streamlined design process, or in the words of the release team themselves, ‘a smoother media editing experience’.

It’s an impressive set of tweaks, considering WordPress 3.8 was released just over four months ago, but this version sees the higher number of contributors than any previous release – with 267 dedicated developers working together to make WordPress 3.9 come to fruition.

So, what are the main improvements users can expect from 3.9?:

  • Drag and Drop: You can now drag and drop images straight into the editor – much easier than the previous upload function
  • Easy Image Editing: Editing images is much easier now, as you can crop, rotate and scale images directly in the editor to save time when creating posts
  • A Better Visual Editor: WordPress have improved the speed and mobile support of their new visual editor. Simply copy and paste from any word processor for a much cleaner format than before
  • Galleries and Playlists: Images now have galleries and media clips form playlists, for easier and neater navigation
  • Easy-To-Use Image Management: The image galleries display your uploaded images within the editor, so your post in progress will look just like the published post
  • Live Header Previews: An improvement’s been made to the header tool, so you can upload and redesign headers at the same time you’re customising your theme
  • Numerous Bug Fixes: A number of existing issues have been fixed by the team, including massive performance improvements to Texturize, which is now approximately 600% faster.

Finally, according to WordPress you’ll now be able to ‘lose yourself in the boundless supply of free WordPress.org themes with the beautiful new theme browser’. What’s not to like?

Any developers or WordPress aficionados amongst you can check out the full changelog over at: https://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.9 to learn even more about this latest release.

Oh, and a fun fact for all you WordPress fans out there: Version 3.9 is nicknamed ‘Smith’, after the late, great Jazz organist Jimmy Smith.