What is new in WordPress 4.5

WordPress 4.5 is next major version planned by WordPress community. Beta 1 of WordPress 4.5 is released on 25th February 2016 and target date for production release is by first week of April. I have installed WordPress 4.5 Beta 1 to just see what all new features going to be introduced in this version. In this article I will try to provide overview of what is new in WordPress 4.5.

Before proceeding further just wanted to add disclaimer that WordPress do not recommend beta version for live website. So please do not use beta version of WordPress 4.5 for your live website.

In any major release of WordPress we can broadly classify new feature in following two category:

1. New feature for webmasters.
2. New feature for web developers.

So let us see what is new for both Webmasters and Web developers in WordPress 4.5

New in WordPress 4.5 for Webmasters

WordPress 4.5 has lots of new thing for webmaster. In this release WordPress has focused to provide some nice feature for content authors and site manager. Below are the things.

1. Responsive preview in customizer : From release 4.5 WordPress introduced responsive preview your website in customizer, so that you can see how your website will look in  Mobile, Tab and Desktop. At bottom of customizer toolbar icon/button to see the site preview in Mobile, Tab and desktop is available. By default you will see desktop preview but by clicking the the icon you can switch the preview.
   Below is mobile view:
   
2. Logo Support in Theme : From version 4.5 WordPress introduced native support for theme logo in customizer. So from version 4.5 theme developers can develop the theme with built-in logo support and webmasters can change logo directly from wordpress admin customizer.
   
3. Inline Link Editing: From WordPress version 4.5 content author can edit links inline. In the WYSIWYG you can directly edit link target while authoring content. Inline editing of links will really make content authors life better.
   
4. New WYSIWYG editor shortcuts : Like inline link editing one more gift for content authors in WordPress 4.5 is some additional shortcuts. If you will enclose any text with * then the text will automatically be formatted to italic. For example *ank* will be converted into ank. Similarly if you will enclose any text with ** then it will be converted into bold, for example **ank** will be converted into ank. If you will enclose any text with ` then ti will be converted into code formatting. Here is the video for new shortcut.
5. Comment Moderation : Comment moderation is much more intuitive from WordPress 4.5. Comment will be show formatted while editing.
6. Better and faster image size generation: This is kind of improvement or we can say it is very core change. In WordPress 4.5 Imagick compression setting are improved and produced 50% less file size while crunching.

Considering above modification it seems like the version target is more inclined towards making website or content management easier.

New in WordPress 4.5 for Developers

As we can see that most of the feature changes are in the admin customizer, hence some new API and hooks are exposed as per the new features. For example to add logo in your theme support you need to add function add_theme_support( 'site-logo', size )
Although there are various new things introduced for developer but below are some eye catchy:

1. Framework to render selective refresh in customizer : A new framework introduced to refresh the part of page in the customizer. So theme or plugin author should code and test their plugin for the compatibility. For more information about selective refresh framework you can refer core documentation of selective refresh in WordPress
2. New Class to handle Multisite: Now $current_blog will no longer be stdclass. Now new class with name WP_Site is introduced with some useful mmethod to manage sites.
3. Introduced new method wp_add_inline_script(): Like wp_add_inline_style , wp_add_inline_script is introduced to add inline JavaScript.

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