WordPress 3.4 ‘Green’ Released: Theme Customizer, Embed Tweets & More

If you’re a big WordPress fan, you may already know that the newest version of WordPress – 3.4 ( Green) was released just a few short hours ago.

WordPress 3.4 Update

In continuing with their long-running tradition of naming updates after jazz musicians, this newest version of WordPress is named after jazz guitarist Grant Green.

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Here’s a quick summary of the new features, courtesy of WordPress.org:

WordPress 3.4 has to offer lots of new features and but this new version has brought new features to WordPress – The Theme Customizer and Embedded tweets.  Let’s take a look on both.

1. The Theme Customizer

The most considerable change for WordPress 3.4. The theme customizer allows you (where supported) to make cosmetic changes to your theme in real-time, including (but not limited to):

  • Title
  • Tagline
  • Background color
  • Custom headers
The theme customizer must be supported by whichever theme you are using, which means that its usefulness will be limited to those themes which are equipped to handle its features.

The WordPress Theme Customizer

This major addition to WordPress is a sign of things to come, as Automattic work towards producing a very user-friendly CMS.

2. Embedded Tweets

Embedding tweets is really simple – just grab the URL of the tweet you want to embed, and paste it into the visual editor. The end result will look something like this:

Embed TweetsEmbedding tweets is a great way of boosting follower rates and re-tweets, so don’t be afraid to use it liberally now that it is so easy with WordPress 3.4.

WordPress is more lightweight than ever

Although WordPress 3.4 includes three new exciting features, that doesn’t mean that the developers have been slacking off on the back end. They have been working hard to make WordPress more lightweight than ever, with the following improvements:

  • Faster WP_Query: post queries have been optimized to improve performance, especially for sites with large databases.
  • Faster translations: the number of strings loaded on the front end has been greatly reduced, resulting in faster front page load times for localized installations. Also, better support for East Asian languages, right-to-left languages, theme translations, and more.
  • Themes API: WP_Theme, wp_get_themes(), wp_get_theme(). Faster, uses less memory, makes use of persistent caching.
  • The custom header and background API has been relocated into the theme support API.
  • The introduction of a new WordPress API that supports custom content types and taxonomies.
  • jQuery, jQuery UI, TinyMCE, Plupload, PHPMailer, SimplePie, and other external libraries were updated. jQuery UI Touch Punch was introduced.
  • Various other minor improvements and bug fixes.

For a full list of absolutely every little tweak made in WordPress 3.4, check out the Codex and the Trac.

WordPress 3.4 is finally out with a healthy set of new features. I believe this is a big leap after the WordPress 3.0 release.

What are you first thoughts? Let me know in the comments section!