I just upgraded my blogs to the new version of WordPress, and I’ve already observed and tinkered with a few of the improvements and additional features of WordPress 3.4 ‘Green‘. I highly recommend you upgrade now, BUT make sure you’ve made a backup of your blog and database first.

Here are some of the new features of WordPress 3.4 and my feedback:

Live Inactive Theme Preview

If you’re planning on switching to a new theme, it’s now easier with WordPress 3.4. It now lets you preview and edit installed themes before you even activate them.

This way, you can design or make changes in the background without visitors seeing any of it. It’s like using plugins like Theme Test Drive.

You can change the main colors, header, background image and basic layout right on the Live Theme Preview page.

The header’s dimensions can also be adjusted depending on your theme. Plus, you can also choose from the default headers that your theme came with or images you already have in your media library.

Every change you make will automatically be applied on the preview on the right. However, in my observation, there’s a slight delay with the changes being applied to the preview, so be patient.

Twitter Embed Made Easy and Pretty!

Embedding videos and images into your blog posts has been a breeze with WordPress.

Now, you can simply paste the URL of the Twitter post and WordPress will automatically convert it into an embedded tweet. Cool, eh?

Note though that the URL needs to be on a separate line. If you need it to be surrounded by other texts, you can use shortcode.

There are other media that you can easily embed too. This works for Youtube or Vimeo videos, Flickr or Photobucket images, etc. For the complete list, check the Codex page on Embeds.

Better Photo Captions

I used to hate the photo captions in WordPress because I can’t insert links (for credits). Now, with the new version, you can! The caption field now accepts HTML codes for links.

Here’s the result:

Another example: An image of a custom jigsaw puzzle I found on the internet. I love the illustration and the colors and I wanted to link to the online store where I found it.

Other Updates

The rest of the improvements made WordPress work faster. I’ve already observed this with my main blogs, which is why WP is now my primary CMS choice, even for designing websites 🙂

For the rest of the updates, you can view the clip before:

You can also view information about this update on the WordPress.org blog.

What do you think of the WordPress 3.4 updates? 🙂