WordPress 3.4 “Green” Released For Download To The Public

WordPress 3.4 titled “Green” the official final release of WordPress 3.4 has been released for download to the public WordPress community. This new version of WordPress comes with several improvements including theme customizer, improved image captions and easy Twitter “Tweet” embeds.

We will go over some of the improved features for users of WordPress 3.4 and those for developers.

WordPress 3.4 Theme Customizer

With the release of WordPress 3.4 comes an improved live previews theme customizer which allows you to change theme colours, backgrounds, theme header images and more. You can preview any changes you make to your theme without actually affecting your live website, once your happy with the changes you have made to your theme you can then publish them for the whole world to see.

Our Opinion On The Theme Customizer

The live changes preview feature is good but we don’t get why a whole new section is required to customize certain theme settings?

WordPress theme standards are getting fragmented enough with many premium theme offerings having different custom built options panels that handle any conceivable part of your themes customization including design settings. This might be a utilized feature in free themes but I don’t see many Premium theme vendors rushing to move all their current theme design options from their existing control panels to the new theme customizer section in WordPress 3.4.

WordPress maybe thought this would be a way of standardizing certain theme option settings, in my personal opinion it’s simply another feature that will most probably further fragment the WordPress User Interface experience. Could be a used feature for free WordPress themes although it may take a while to be adopted by the premium developers.

As like anything to do with WordPress though I could be completely wrong on this one and we do see a fast adoption of this new feature. Whats your thoughts on the new WordPress 3.4 theme customizer section?

Easy Twitter Embeds

WordPress 3.4 Basic HTML In Image Captions

WordPress 3.4 now allows you to use basic HTML in the image caption section to add a linkable image source etc like the example below.

Information For Developers

You can read all of the changes to WordPress 3.4 from the WordPress 3.4 Codex Page.