WordPress 4.3 “Billie” Released
WordPress 4.3 – Billie
WordPress 4.3, or “Billie” (named for jazz singer Billie Holiday), was released on Tuesday, August 18th. Every new Core release is a big deal for the WordPress community because it signifies work put into making a better product, providing a better CMS, and making WordPress more accessible and fun for everyone. WordPress 4.3 is exciting not just because it signifies another step forward for this community, but also because it boasts some amazing new features!
Billie Release Video
Stronger suggested passwords for users
Security is always a concern in anything, whether it’s on the web or within a room, you need a strong lock on that door. WordPress now suggests extremely strong autogenerated passwords to new users or those who have forgotten their passwords. This helps prevent against brute force guessing and makes all WordPress sites more secure when used.
Comments are automatically turned off for pages!
This is my personal favorite. I’m not even joking, this is so big to me I nearly cried happy tears. Comments are off by default for pages and this makes all of the little mishaps, mistakes, or forgetfulness moot for pages in the future. I absolutely love this and I’m not shy about it.
Multiple new features added to the Customizer
Menu customization has now joined widget management in the appearance editor. You are still able to use the old method of managing your menus, but having the ability to take care of multiple items simply by going to Appearance -> Customize is definitely beneficial.
Site Icon
In addition to handling your menus from the Appearance Customizer, you are now also able to select your site icon. This icon can be used as your favicon, your icon, and even as your mobile image for those who save your site to view offline or as a shortcut on their phones.
Your editor now has awesome shorthand shortcuts
The enhancements that have been added to the default WordPress editor are huge. As any dev will tell you, being able to have your editor know what you’re trying to type is a huge advantage and a great help. Billie allows for users to type shorthand prior to their sentences and change those sentences into corresponding HTML.
For instance, if you’d like to start an unordered list, you would type an * or -, hit space, and begin typing the first bullet. For a numbered list, you would type 1. or 1), hit space, and begin typing the first point. To make a Heading 2 (or <h2>) you would type ## and then begin typing the content. For a Heading 3 (or <h3>), you would type ### and begin typing.
There are a multitude of different options available for shorthand typing. For a full list of shortcuts, click on the help icon in the visual editor.
For those of you who are unaware, this is a major release. What this means is that unless you’re using managed WordPress hosting, you’re going to have to manually update to WordPress 4.3. As always, before updating anything major, make sure that you create a complete WordPress backup before doing so. There are several tools that could help you accomplish this, but simply downloading the remote files and creating an SQL export should suffice.
In summation, it seems like the WordPress community continues to do more and exceed expectations. There were a total of 79 contributors to WordPress 4.3 who had never contributed to WordPress before! That’s more work from great people to create a product that we can all use!