Coming Updates: WordPress 4.0

Important Notice: WordPress.com will be upgraded to WordPress 4.0 in the coming weeks. Our current target is the week of July 21.

Preparing for 4.0

Roughly three times a year, the WordPress open source project releases a new update of the WordPress software. The project’s timeline and features can be tracked on the main core blog. These updates from the WordPress open source project get incorporated into WordPress.com – if you’re not familiar with this process you can read more about it here.

WordPress 4.0 includes numerous improvements, including a few updates to the “Edit Post” page, which I’ll go into more detail below.

What do I need to do?

Developers: This is a reminder to test early and often. The easiest way to test is to use our VIP Quickstart development environment. It automatically sets you up with an SVN checkout of trunk (and auto-updates every time you run vip-init.sh or .bat). You can also use the Beta Tester plugin to easily update beta releases and test.

Managers and Editorial: It is extremely important to work with your development team to get access to a staging or test site running WordPress 4.0. This will allow you to test your workflow against the update to make sure there are no surprises when we update your production environment. Since this particular update includes changes to the “Edit Post” page, it will be a good idea to walk through your entire workflow to make sure there are no issues with any customizations your team has made.

What’s new in WordPress 4.0?

While WordPress 4.0 is still under active development, here’s a quick overview of what we anticipate the feature set to be. As always, the best place to track WordPress development is on the core blog, in trac tickets marked for 4.0, or in the weekly developer chats.

Media Library “Grid View”
This update makes the Media > Library tab in the WordPress dashboard more similar to the “Add Media” modal. In addition to the existing “List” view, it now also gives you a “Grid” view that you’re familiar with. You can track progress of this feature here.

Focusing on the Post Editor
This feature is still in early stages, but the plan is to update the post editor to make the editing tools more easily accessible, especially when working on a lengthy post. This update will “pin” the TinyMCE toolbar (bold, itals, bullets, etc.) to the top of the page when you’re editing a post so that you can easily access editing tools even while at the bottom of an article. It’s still very early stages for this feature, but you can track progress here.

Making Embeds Better
There are two main updates to oEmbed. The first update is behind-the-scenes, and improves the way oEmbeds are cached (more here). The second update will be welcomed by editors – it allows you to preview embeds within your post editor, instead of needing to tab over to “Preview” to see how they look. You can track progress of this feature here.

SSL Improvements
WordPress 4.0 will be making a lot of improvements relating to SSL support. At WordPress.com VIP, we already forced all admin pages to be served over SSL in May, and worked through a slew of issues then. As you test 4.0, look out for insecure content warnings and issues relating to custom plugins.

Other Items to Test

• Pasting from Word, and Pasting in TinyMCE. Bugfixes have gone into this functionality so it’s worth testing to make sure it works as expected.
• Inserting, moving, and scaling images, as bugfixes have gone in to image handling.
• Creating and removing tags and categories, as there have been updates to terms.

And as always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.