Hello, WordPress 4.7!

It seems like we were just talking about WordPress 4.6, and now 4.7 has arrived. Time doesn’t appear to stand still.

The new version of WordPress, named “Vaughan” after Jazz legend Sarah Vaughan, brings a few significant improvements and a new theme.

• Twenty Seventeen – The new theme is the first one in a long time that I think people will actually be interested in using on a real site. It’s clean, modern, and perfect for a blog.
• Starter content – If you’re installing WordPress anew, you’ll have the ability to populate your site with what amounts to demo content if your theme supports it. It will help you figure out where things go and how they work. Right now it only works on fresh installs of WordPress with themes that support starter content. A lot of premium themes already include things like this, but it’s great to see it become part of core as it’ll make WordPress easier for new users.
• Edit shortcuts – This is a really cool feature that allows you to see what can be edited within the Theme Customizer and simply click to begin editing it. Again, premium themes have been offering this for years – it’s basically what visual builders do – but it’s a step in the right direction for core.
• Video headers – Now you can add a large video to your theme from within the Theme Customizer, if your theme supports it. Not the most exciting update since most themes just have a custom interface for this already.
• Smoother menu building – This is a great feature for those of us building large sites. If you’re creating menu items and the pages don’t already exist for the items you’re adding, WordPress creates the automatically. It’s a great way to quickly build out a site.
• Custom CSS – Now available from within the Theme Customizer.
• A few other things like PDF thumbnails in the Media Library, custom languages for the dashboard, and nerdy dev stuff, all outlined in detail here.

Oh, and here’s a bit of Sarah Vaughan to make your morning that much more mellow.