6 Things You Need To See in Wordpress 3.4

It's been a few days now since the latest version of Wordpress rolled out. I've had a lot of questions from different people asking about different aspects of the new version and there is some really good stuff you will want to see.

With each release Wordpress becomes more flexible and easier to use. In recent releases they added options to embed media content by adding the link directly to your post or page, made it easier to edit, and manage your dashboard, and made it even easier to create content in relative virtual silence with the distraction-free writing mode.

This new release brings in some much needed improvements and new features. Let's take a look.

Live Theme Customizer with Preview

This is a great feature for customizing your own theme. You can customize a lot of stuff here including your site title, and tagline among several other things including your header image. When you click on a theme in your dashboard it brings you in to the customization window where you have access to all the customization options.

The preview feature opens a preview window in your dashboard where you can test out a theme, make changes and try things out before you set it as your theme.

Improved Handling of Page Templates

If you're doing more extensive customization to themes then you will be excited about this new addition. You can create and place custom page templates in to subdirectories for your theme.

Customized Header Improvements

The way Wordpress handled customized headers previously was frustrating, in my opinion. You had to make sure that any image that you added was the same dimensions that your theme called for. This has been improved and you now have greater flexibility. In addition you also have the ability to select images for use as your header image from your media library.

Embedding Tweets

6 Things You Need To See Wordpress 3.4 | Orracle Media buff.ly/LdJYd7

— Rob Orr (@roborracle) June 26, 2012

Just as simple as it has been to add videos by directly adding the link from YouTube to your post, you now have the ability to do the same thing with Tweets. Twitter made some cool improvements a while back that allowed users to embed tweets in to posts on their website. Now Twitter enjoys this same support as other media. Just paste the link to the tweet and Wordpress takes care of the rest.

External Libraries Updated

Wordpress relies on a few different external libraries like Tiny MCE and JQuery. These have all been updated to the latest releases.

HTML as Image Captions

Now you can add html code directly to your image captions. This is a great improvement that will be very useful for people who use image captions and want to include links to sources, or other references.

Wordpress is an amazing tool and it just keeps getting better and better. What's your favorite new feature to Wordpress?