WordPress 4.7 Now Available - Features a New Default Theme & Usability Improvements

3 mins

A new release of the popular open source content management system, WordPress, is upon us. Version 4.7 brings with it a new default theme as well as a slew of usability and design enhancements. Let's take a look through some of the changes in this latest release.

New Theme – Twenty Seventeen

The new theme, aptly named Twenty Seventeen is a theme designed for business websites that focuses on a creative home page and an easy site setup experience for users.

Features include:

multiple sections on the front page, selected in the Customizer.
a striking asymmetrical grid.
custom color schemes, built on top of a monochromatic foundation, and adjustable via a hue picker.
different headline placement for pages, changeable in the Customizer, via them options.
a great experience in many languages, thanks to language-specific font stacks.
SVG icons (a first for a default theme).
support for custom logo, custom header image and many post formats.
the use of new functions in Core for making child theming easier.

Other updates in this release include:

Theme Starter Content

Starter Content is the theme-specific selections of content to help showcase a theme to users and serve as a starting point for further setup of new sites. The initial view of a theme with starter content will only happen for “fresh sites” – new installs that have not yet had any posts, pages, widgets, or customizer settings updated (read more).

Edit Shortcuts

Visible icons appear to show you which parts can be customized right there while live previewing. Click on a shortcut and get straight to editing, no decoding of widget area names or extra clicks needed. Paired with starter content, getting started with customizing your site is faster than ever (read more).

Video Headers

WordPress 4.7 extends the Custom Header feature to introduce support for video. Video headers play automatically, loop by default, and don't have sound. They work best when paired with an image, so they can progressively enhance the experience when video is supported (read more).

Smoother Nav Menu Building

Many primary navigation menus for sites contain links to the pages of your site. But what happens when you don't have any pages yet? Now you can add new pages while building nav menus instead of leaving the customizer and abandoning your changes. Once you've published your customizations, you'll have new pages ready for you to fill with content (read more).

Custom CSS

Sometimes you just need a few more visual tweaks to make your site perfect, or a plugin adds something that doesn't quite look right with your site. WordPress 4.7 allows you to instantly see changes while adding custom CSS to give your site that polish (read more 1 and 2).

User Admin Languages and Locale Switching

Users can select their preferred locale (language) when editing their profile. The back end will be displayed in the user's individual locale while the locale used on the front end equals the one set for the whole site (read more).

PDF Thumbnail Previews

Managing your document collection is easier with WordPress Version 4.7, which now shows preview thumbnails instead of a generic icon for PDFs in the media library (read more).

For additional details on this release visit https://codex.wordpress.org/Version_4.7 or to download visit https://wordpress.org