On August 18th, 2015, WordPress 4.3 “Billie” came out. It’s named after the jazz singer Billie Holiday and focuses on customising sites and text formatting in general.
Highlights
- Formatting Shortcuts in the visual editor: Probably the most remarkable change in WP 4.3. If you’re in the visual editor you can create ordered or unordered lists by using 1. or *, creating headings with #(for H2 it would be ## and for H3 ###, etc). blockquote will be created by starting with >
- Strong Password: every user created, will receive a strong password on the beginning. People will be able to choose if they keep it or choose their own. This will be rated by a strength meter and can be hidden at insertion if wanted. Passwords won’t be sent anymore via email from WordPress
- Favicon manager: favicons, now can be managed on mobil and desktop, theme independent and don’t require any support from themes at all
- Comments deactivated by default: Comments are now turned off on pages and custom post types by default.
- Menu management: menus now can be configured in the customisation screen. This comes along with better usability for menus and nameless menus as a new feature
- Quick site customisation: changes on your sited now can be done swiftly in the frontend by using the customise-button in the toolbar
For developers
- Fast previewing changes to Menus in the Customizer
- A new theme template has been added to the Template Hierarchy. The
singular.phptemplate follows the rules ofis_singularand is used for a single post, regardless of post type. It comes in the hierarchy aftersingle.php,page.php, and the variations of each. Themes that used the same code for both of those files (or included one in the other) can now simplify down to the one template. - Changes to Customizer Panels and Sections
- New Customizer Media Controls
- The Site Icon API is fairly straightforward.
- PHP7 is slated for release later this year. One of the changes is that PHP4 style constructors are deprecated. In order to prepare WordPress to support PHP7, these constructors have been deprecated in WordPress core.
- Old Distraction Free Writing code has been removed (the code has not been used in the core since 4.1). Plugin authors have had two releases to update their code. If it is essential to your plugin, the files in 4.2 can still be reused and improved.
Remember to keep your WordPress always up-to-date and to have a backup before upgrading. If you are using twentyfiften as theme it should be updated to Version 1.3 which was released together with WP 4.3. If not you probably will have a white page.
