WordPress 4.0: It's not on the inside, but it's up the top of the page -

I realise that the subject of this blog won't mean much to anyone who doesn't belong to the 1980s, but here's a little knowledge about culture for you You're invited.

WordPress v4.0 has been released on 4 September and two from the WooTeam ( myself and Mike Jolley) being part of the 275 people who contributed to the release. A lot of discussion was made about WordPress 4.0 specifically in relation to the obvious landmark version, which the name seems to indicate, so we thought it'd be an interesting to review what's included in the release and see just what difference that it brings to our everyday lives.

What's included WordPress 4.0?

Every WordPress release includes an array of new updates, enhancements, and general changes. This release was no different and in v4.0 there were 711 tickets that were included every ticket is a new feature, an enhancement on the existing one, or a fix for a broken feature.

The following are the major enhancements that WordPress 4.0 has to offer: 4.0:

• Views of the grid, enhanced and detail views to the media library
• Better embedding of media into articles (YouTube, Twitter, etc.)
• Improvements to the post editor include a toolbar which slides down the page when you compose
• A new plugin search that is enhanced with much more visually appealing results for searches

There is a complete listing of all 711 closed tickets part of this release on the WordPress Core Trac.

Where are the new capabilities?

If you look at the list of features in the above list, you'll see the majority of these are improvement or improvements to already-existing (already functioning) capabilities. The result was a large number of people to dismiss v4.0 as a release that's not enough to be worthy of the landmark it represents (more on that below) But what a lot of people don't realise is that the enhancements are intended to refine WordPress to be an even greater platform for creating and publishing work.

Pippin Williamson made several excellent points on this subject already and there's no reason to go into detail here just to point out that once you've worked with WordPress 4.0 for a while, you'll see that the 'additions have become so useful that you won't understand why you didn't have the enhancements until this point.

As a WordPress plugin creator, I love the latest search pages for plugins, and for bloggers, the blog editor has been deemed to be revolutionizing. This alone makes this a major new release for WordPress.

What's all this fuss about this version?

The majority of software applications employ semantic version numbering, which implies that a 4.0 release will be an even more important release than v3.9 and could modify the software entirely. WordPress doesn't work in a way like it does, instead treating 4.0 exactly like 3.9 and 4.1 (you are able to learn more about WordPress' version numbering system on this page). Its, and its impressive improvements that the new version offers, puts a stop to those who claim that WordPress 4.0 is "hugely uninspiring".

What's coming up in WordPress 4.1?

It's hard to say what the main features of WordPress 4.1 is, however If you take a look at the tickets that are earmarked for to hit the 4.1 milestone and you'll have an concept of what you can expect. There will, as usual, improve and fix current features and a number of additional features that could enhance WordPress even further.

Want to get involved in WordPress core development? Look through the following list of useful first bugs for contributors who are new to the project.