WordPress 4.0 Released With Useful Features To Add A Richer Platform

What do CNN, The Blaze, Fox News, Flickr, TechCrunch, eBay and Best Buy all have in common?

They all use WordPress. Initially developed as a blogging platform, WordPress has evolved in the last 11 years to a full-fledged popular content management system (CMS), capable of hosting static and dynamic content, e-commerce and event calendars, audio and video podcasts, and more, thanks largely to an expansive plugin system and a supportive community.

Of the top 10 million Alexa-ranked websites, 23% use WordPress; of those sites that use a CMS, WordPress accounts for 61% of the market. WordPress dwarfs the competition, with Joomla and Drupal holding only 8% and 5% of the CMS market, respectively.

Media  and Plugin Options

WordPress 4.0 focuses on making it easier for site admins to write content, install plugins and manage media. If you spend any time at all in your site’s back end (as opposed to using a client like WordPress for iOS or Android or MarsEdit 3 for Mac), these changes will be apparent and appreciated.

There are now more options for adding rich content to your posts. Have an image, video or tweet to share with your readers? Since WordPress 2.9, authors have been able to paste the link directly into the WYSYWIG editor (or by clicking “Add Media > Insert from URL”) and WordPress would automatically embed the referenced media at a width appropriate to their theme — for example, so that a YouTube video would play within a site. There’s been no need to obtain separate embed code or use the HTML editor.

With WordPress 4.0, that automatically embedded media can now come from any of 26 supported sites. Joining essential platforms such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Instagram are others such as CollegeHumor, Issuu, Mixcloud and TED Talks.

Also new in 4.0 is the ability to see the embedded media in the WYSYWIG editor, offering a more accurate preview of the published post. But this feature works only when pasting in URLs from the aforementioned 26 hosts. If you prefer to manually obtain, configure and insert a site’s embed code in order to, say, start a video at a certain time or add captions, WordPress will not show a preview of media embedded in this fashion.

This is a repost for our Chicago, Naperville and Glen Ellyn web design network team.