Version 4.8 named “Evans” in honour of American jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans, is a major WordPress release, and so unless you are on a managed WordPress hosting service, you will need to manually update, even if you have set WordPress to auto-update.
We strongly recommend you create a backup of site files and database before making the update, just to be careful. There’s always the potential for a plugin not to have kept pace with WordPress updates.
So, what’s new in this release?
Version 4.8 contains three new default widgets which users had been requesting for some time and an upgrade to the existing text widget.
1. An Image Widget
With previous versions of WordPress if you wanted to add an image to a sidebar, then you had to either use a plugin or write custom HTML.
With WordPress 4.8, you can simply drag and drop the default image widget to a sidebar and click on the ‘Add image’ button in the widget settings. This brings up the familiar WordPress media uploader. From there you can either select an image from the media library or upload the image from your computer in the usual way. Once uploaded, click on the ‘Add to widget’ button, and you will be able to see a preview of the image. Remember to click on the save button to store your widget settings.
2. Video Widget
WordPress 4.8 also includes a simple-to-use video widget. You can use this to upload videos direct to WordPress, but we strongly advise you not to do this. It is much better to embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo or similar and so save the bandwidth on your own hosting package.
The video widget makes it easy to embed videos. You simply click on the ‘Add video’ button in the widget. This will bring up the media uploader popup and you click on the ‘Insert from URL’ and then paste the video URL.
Once again click on the ‘Add to widget’ button, and you will see the video thumbnail in the widget area. Remember to click on the save button to keep your video widget settings.
3. Audio Widget
Just like the video and image widgets, the audio widget allows you to add audio files easily to a sidebar. Just drag the widget into place then click on the ‘Add audio’ button to upload your audio file. The widget supports MP3, OGG, and WAV audio file formats and embeds the file in a HTML5 audio player.
4. Text Widget
The previous default text widget just privided a plain text area and you had to be able to write HTML to format the text. WordPress 4.8 has a new and improved text widget with a simplified version of the visual editor that you use to write posts or page content. You now have the option for bold or italic text, bullet points , and links.
5. Link Updating Changes
Whilst most of the changes you’ll notice in 4.8 are the additions of widgets, one further, useful improvement is to the general editor for the pages and posts.
Have you ever tried updating a link, or the text around a link, and found you can’t seem to edit it properly? Often you get a frustrating scenario where when you edit the text after the link, your new text also ends up linked, or you edit the text within the link, but your text ends up outside of it. With WordPress 4.8 you now have link boundaries, so the process is streamlined and your links should work well.
