New in WordPress 4.8 [Video Tour]

See the new features coming in WordPress 4.8, including new audio, video, and image widgets, plus an enhanced Text widget.

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Additional Notes 

Addition of TinyMCE to the Text Widget

I’m delighted that a text editor has finally been added to the Text Widget.

Here’s what the WP devs say about why it took so long:

“A primary reason for the long delay in incorporating TinyMCE into the Text widget was the difficulty of cleanly instantiating another copy of the WordPress visual editor dynamically after the page has loaded.”

To fix this problem, a new JS API was added to load another instance of TinyMCE.

I’m guessing that’s similar to how other text editor widget plugins have been doing it for years. They brought in their own scripts and library support for it.

So glad, WP natively supports this now.

And, it’s something you may want to try after you update too. Just deactivate your current widget text editor plugin and create a new Text Widget and see how you like the new native editor.

It only supports the most basic editor tools, but that may all you need.

And it still doesn’t support shortcodes yet. In fact, it originally broke shortcodes, but they fixed that. You should check any widgets that use shortcode after the update, though.

Now, this new feature required a rebuild of how the Text Widget saves form data. So, whether you use the new Text Editor or not, you’ll want to check all of your current Text Widgets after you update to 4.8 to ensure all is well with them. That’s especially true if you’re using another Widget editor plugin too and if it gets updated as well.

I’m interested to see if the TinyMCE Advanced plugin will incorporate the new native support and bring its full editor to the Text Widget. 

New Media Widgets for Audio, Video, and Images

Adding media files to widgets, even an image, required getting into HTML code. Well, not anymore! The new media widgets have a text editor and tools to make it easy to include files uploaded to your media folder.

Widgets were introduced in WP 2.2 and written in the PHP coding language.

The core devs have built these new widgets on Javascript, and in a way that is extensible for even more types of media such as galleries and playlists too, so we can look forward to that in the future.

Just like the new Text Widget, this rebuild required changing the fields in the widget. So, we’ll see if there are any bugs as more folks test different kinds of media in them.

And, there was an issue with the new media widget goofing up with certain embed URL link formats from both Vimeo and YouTube, but that appears to be fixed now. 

Easier Link Editing

In WP 4.8, we should be able to edit links a little easier too. It should be plain whether your cursor is inside the link field or not. I’ll be testing that out. 

Cleaner Headings on Admin Pages

WP 4.8 continues recent efforts to improve accessibility. In this version, they cleaned up the hierarchy of page headings, making the H1 tags.

This may affect plugins that have their own admin pages. So expect those plugins to update for this at some point. 

Tag Cloud Changes

Do you use a tag cloud in your sidebar? With WP 4.8 the words will now have a count beside them of how many posts have that tag. It’s a little more orderly than the progressively bigger fonts used in the cloud layout now, but far less visually interesting, I think. 

WordCamps and MeetUps in the Dashboard

In an effort to help get more folks involved in their local WP community, the WordPress news module in the admin dashboard has been expanded to include news of upcoming WordCamps and MeetUps.

It will attempt to auto determine the location of the logged in user in order to display nearby events. But, you can input a city as well.

With this change, they also removed the Popular Plugins feed from the dashboard. 

Auto Focus Disabled on Login Screen

This new filter may impact those who have custom login screens, such as those on member sites. So, be sure to check those pages after you update to 4.8, and perhaps look for an update to the plugin that creates that login page, if you use one. 

Screencast.com Added to oEmbed List

WP continues to lengthen the platforms it natively supports for direct embeds. Screencast is a super way to share screenshot images and videos you’ve created with SnagIt and Camtasia.