WordPress 4.9 Features and Screenshots

November 14, 2017, is the day when the release of WordPress 4.9 is scheduled. WordPress 4.9 Beta, the tester version of the upcoming version of WordPress, gives a glimpse of what features may make it to the final update of WordPress 4.9.

The latest and even advanced features are expected to make WordPress even an easier tool to develop a visually attractive and well-navigated website.

Even though the main attraction is the new customizer features, where you can schedule changes in Themes, WordPress 4.9 is supposed to bring many advanced features that will act as a wonderful assistant to help you make your website amazing.

So, let’s get started with getting familiar with what to expect from WordPress 4.9 and its features to understand how it is going to help in updating the better version of your website.

Save Theme Changes in Draft and Schedule the Publishing Time

With this amazing feature of WordPress 4.9, you will be able to make changes in the theme customizer and save the ones that you liked the most in a draft. The changes in the customizer, which cannot be published immediately, can be saved now.

When you do not intend to publish the changes because you need an approval or suggestion from someone, you will be able to come back to the drafts to get reviewed and confirmed by the person in charge.

You can also set the time when you want particular changes saved in the drafts to get published. When you have multiple web-designing projects lined up, you can now save the drafts with necessary changes in themes and schedule their publishing time, so that you won’t miss any deadlines.

This feature comes handy when you have a team of editors for your websites, or you have clients who are going to make decisions about the outlook for the website you are designing. When people, whose opinion matters, cannot access changes you are making in the design and confirm, you can save all the changes as a draft and present it to them. You can even share a preview link with concerned people, as WordPress 4.9 gives you that option.

Addition of a Media Button in Text Widgets

So, did you have to go through the trouble of writing an HTML code every time you wanted to add images or videos to the text widgets? Now, you won’t need to learn HTML or have knowledge about CSS to make your website more attractive by adding beautiful images or videos or even audio files.

This wonderful feature of WordPress 4.9 will easily enable you to embed media files to the text widget without having to know how to code. So, we can hope that your creativity in making your website attractive won’t be hindered because you don’t know HTML, anymore!

Inclusion of the New Gallery Widget

In WordPress 4.8, the media widget was already available. Now WordPress 4.9 is coming with a gallery widget. The new widget consists of an option where you can set columns, order and number of photographs from your native gallery. Showcasing a beautiful collection of images with a widget, which provides you an option to edit the gallery and add or delete images, will be easier with WordPress 4.9.

Advanced Feature to Improve the Coding Experience

WordPress 4.9 makes available an enhanced code editor, where you get advanced editing tools. You can get a better coding experience in a CSS, theme, or a plugin editor with various tools like syntax highlighting.

It comes with auto-completion and code suggestion which helps in fixing syntax mistakes and error-free coding. This is probably the first time when an auto-correct feature won’t irritate you. Syntax highlighter can be turned off whenever you want to.

Notification Area for Better Indication of Changes Being Saved

This new feature of WordPress 4.9 eliminated the drawback of WordPress 4.8 which did not notify the success or failure of an action taken to apply a change. Now WordPress 4.9 is expected to consist of a more reliable notification function, where you get a better understanding of whether the changes you made were successfully saved or not. When the changes you wished to ‘Save’ are actually saved, the button ‘Save’ notifies it by changing into ‘Saved’. With such features, the new version of WordPress has decreased the chances of committing errors while building a website.

Fewer Complications in the Flow of Creating New Menu

Creating menu is quite a complicated process right now, with WordPress 4,8. Sometimes we forget the location where the new menu is being saved, which makes it difficult to understand why the saved menu did not appear at the intended location. But this problem is going to be rectified in WordPress 4.9. As the name of the menu and its location is to be set in the same window, the process becomes much easier, and none of your new menus will be misplaced!

Security Feature to Confirm the Changed Email Id

Whenever you add or change a saved email address in WordPress 4.9, it includes a security feature to authenticate the changes. A confirmation link is sent to the newly added email address. The link must be accessed and clicked by the user to confirm the changes and complete the authentication process.

Embedding Videos from Websites Other Than Vimeo and YouTube

Video widget in WordPress 4.8 only supported attaching videos from YouTube or Vimeo. WordPress 4.9 eliminates this limitation. You will be able to add video from oEmbed or thumbnail to the video widget present in WordPress 4.9.

Latest and advanced features in WordPress 4.9 are expected to assist you well in building the website just like you want it.

Soon you will be able to experience all these features of WordPress 4.9 after it’s released. If you can’t wait until November 14th, you can install the tester plugin released by WordPress and try your hands on it. But I would suggest you do so only if you know what you are doing.

As WordPress 4.9 is still under development, the plugin is unstable. Take a backup of the data on your website before installing. But if you can try and test all these features, please do let us know how the new update works out for you, in the comments!