What’s New in WordPress 4.5

Many new features and enhancements just arrived for WordPress in the latest 4.5 release, available now for download and upgrading your current WordPress sites. (In fact, WordPress 4.5 has already been downloaded over 258,000 times as of writing this post.) Several of the new features that are part of WordPress 4.5 are:

• Inline Link Editing – This new method of editing your links inside your posts/pages are less distracting and keeps you focused on the content and easily enables the linking of your local content.
• Live Responsive Previews – There are three powerful buttons in the WordPress Customizer that allow you to see live previews of your site for mobile versions, tablet versions, and desktop versions.  Now you can make sure your site works and looks great across different sized screens.
• Custom Logos – Themes can now have logos attached to the theme.  This is a perfect feature to take advantage when doing client work because you can now brand themes in the Site Identity section of the WordPress Customizer.

There are also a number of enhancements and code improvements that took place under the hook of WordPress 4.5.

• Smart Image Resizing – allows for generated images to load much faster with no quality loss.
• Selective Refresh – the Customizer has been improved to better present the live look and feel of the site.
• Script Loading Improvements – a ton of optimization went into improving the addition of scripts to the header and/or footer of a site along with better ways of handling the dependencies.  A new function wp_add_inline_script() enables the addition of extra code for registered scripts.
• Improved Embed Templates – Embed templates have now been split into parts and can be overridden by themes in accordance with template hierarchy.
• Javascript Library Updates – WordPress 4.5 now ships with jQuery 1.12.3, jQuery Migrate 1.4.0, Backbone 1.2.3, and Underscore 1.8.3.

So, head over to your websites and make sure you have a quality backup of your WordPress site and then upgrade. Or if you are an iThemes Sync user, you only need to press one button and have all your sites updated to the latest version of WordPress at once.

Log in to the Sync dashboard to update

What is your favorite new feature or enhancement that arrived with WordPress 4.5?