WordPress 4.5 Beta 1

by Mike Schroder

WordPress 4.5 Beta 1 is now available!

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.5, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 4.5 is slated for release on April 12, but to get there, we need your help testing what we have been working on, including:

  • Responsive Preview of your site in the Customizer (#31195) – See how your site looks in mobile, tablet, and desktop contexts before making changes to its appearance.
  • Theme Logo Support (#33755) – Native support for a theme logo within the Customizer.
  • Inline Link Editing (#33301) – Within the visual editor, edit links inline for a smoother workflow.
  • Additional Editor Shortcuts (#33300) – Includes a few new shortcuts, like `..` for code and **..** for bold.
  • Comment Moderation Improvements (#34133) – An enhanced experience when moderating comments, including preview with rendered formatting.
  • Optimization of Image Generation (#33642) – Image sizes are generated more efficiently and remove unneeded meta, while still including color profiles in Imagick, for reduced sizes of up to 50% with near identical visual quality.

 

There have been changes for developers to explore as well:

  • Selective Refresh (#27355) – A comprehensive framework for rendering parts of the customizer preview in real time. Theme and plugin authors should test their widgets specifically for compatibility with selective refresh, and note that it may ultimately be opt-in for 4.5.
  • Backbone and Underscore updated to latest versions (#34350) – Backbone is upgraded from 1.1.2 to 1.2.3 and Underscore is upgraded from 1.6.0 to 1.8.3. See the this post for important changes.
  • Embed templates (#34561) – Embed templates were split into parts and can now be directly overridden by themes via the template hierarchy.
  • New WP_Site class (#32450) – More object-oriented approach for managing sites in Multisite
  • Script loader (#14853, #35873) – Introduces wp_add_inline_script() for including inline JavaScript just like wp_add_inline_style() works for CSS, and better support for script header/footer dependencies.

If you want a more in-depth view of what major changes have made it into 4.5, check out all 4.5-tagged posts on the main development blog, or check out a list of everything that’s changed.

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs.

Happy testing!

A wonderful day
is one that brings new WordPress
Four Five Beta One

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