WordPress 4.1- Release and Features

The latest version, WordPress 4.1 was made available for download last week after nearly four months of development. WordPress 4.1 is named ‘Dinah’ in honor of the the jazz singer ‘Dinah Washington’. WordPress 4.1 has a lot of new elements including a new theme, improved distraction free writing experience, updates to language support, vine embeds and much more. Let’s look at the changes and what they mean to the users.

New Default theme

WordPress 4.1 comes with a new elegant default theme Twenty Fifteen. It is a clean and beautiful blog focused theme with great typography, and is highly easily customizable to give the desired look to your blog. The Twenty Fifteen theme comes with the Google’s Noto Font Family support. Content is treated as the main focus in this theme and it is responsive too.

Full Screen Writing Experience

To help you write better and enjoy your writing experience without any distractions. WordPress 4.1 has introduced distraction free writing experience, there is a minimalistic full screen writing mode with quick access to few important meta-boxes.

Inline Image Editing Toolbar

WordPress has come up with a great tool for people who find it difficulty in aligning the image inside the editor. WordPress 4.1 introduces a new inline image editing toolbar that allows users to easily align the images without opening the media editor each time.

Plugin Recommendation

From WordPress 4.1 onwards you’ll get plugin recommendations from WordPress for you to try. These recommendations are based on the plugins you or the other users have installed on their WordPress website.

Logout Everywhere

WordPress 4.1 comes with a new session UI, it detects if there are more than one active session. This is a great feature for those who might have left a session open on another or shared device, now you need not worry about the security of your website. You can log out of all sessions with a single click.

Improvements for Developers

WordPress 4.1 comes with some very exciting changes for the developers under the hood. Developers can now use advanced conditional logic like nested clauses and multiple operators for Metadata, date and term queries. There is major improvement in title tags and a couple of new template tags included with this update. There are several changes in Customizer API as well and other improvements such as contextual panels, sections and Java templates for control.

WordPress 4.1 is a major release and hence will not get automatically updated. Remember to back up your site before you initiate the update.