Launched this week, WordPress 3.4 dubbed “Green” – in honour of guitarist Grant Green apparently – introduces a good number of tweaks and new features that many in the WordPress community have applauded loudly.
WordPress itself is leading the launch with praise for the Custom Headers and Background feature that means the world’s favourite blogging engine is now even more customisable, as they push towards making WordPress the web ‘design’ choice of the masses. Headers can now be flexible in height and width making it even more enticing to designers and offering many more options in terms of theme design.
Live Theme customizer is another tweak that designers will enjoy. Now if your customer wants your theme in a certain colour, they can make those adjustments themselves using built-in WordPress options.
For the every-day use of WordPress the Twitter embed – insert the URL of the Twitter message and find the whole message embedded in your blog – is a great feature as is the image caption facility.
There are lots of other bug-fixes and minor amends , but the general consensus from the WordPress community appears to be one of joy at the changes. However, there is also a suggestion that the changes do more to impress Theme Designers looking to make a living out of selling their themes that one-off designers using WordPress to design straight into. That may well be the case as WordPress looks to continue to appeal to the masses and make it easier for almost anybody to get a site up. Where the web design community needs to act is to ensure that potential customers know how much better a professionally designed site using WordPress can be, with expert knowledge still important in the template driven world.
Don’t forget, WordPress is one of the many free Fusion Apps available to you with Webfusion web hosting, and as a growing platform making sure you can design with and to WordPress makes any web designer ultimately more marketable.
