WordPress 4.8 (Evans) Released – What’s new there?
WordPress 4.8 (names as Evans) is released with some exciting features. Though it is a minor release, the new features are really awesome and useful too. This update is available for production sites, directly from the WordPress admin dashboard. Although every release comes up with many bug fixes and improvements to the core, this release was majorly focused on the widgets. Yeah, that’s correct. So, this update primarily contains the following things:
1. A Brand New Image Widget
Gone are the days when we had to manually use <img/> tag in the widgets to add an image. (a <a> tag for hyperlink too). And that was very messy sometimes if you miss something in the HTML. I need this feature especially when I add an affiliate banner to the widget. Here is a snapshot of this new image widget.
It was never easy to add a plain image or an image with a hyperlink in WordPress widget earlier. Thanks to this WordPress’s new widget, which is surely going to make our life easy. Especially for affiliate marketers 🙂
Read also: Google AdSense Approval Guide 2019
2. The Video Widget
The second widget in the list is the video widgets. Through this widget, you can display a video from the media library, YouTube, Vimeo or any other source. To add video from YouTube, Vimeo etc. all you need is the video url and you are done. Here is how this video widget looks like,
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3. and an Audio widget too
After Image and Video widget, here comes an audio widget. With this widget, adding an audio player (with a particular audio) in a WordPress because easy. We can add an audio from media library or from any URL. Want to have a quick look? See below 🙂
4. The updated text widget (and now rich text widget)
The existing text widget has been updated to a rich text widget. Yeah, now we can add right text to a WordPress widget too. Sounds cool, isn’t it? We can add Normal text/ bold text/ italic text, numbered list and bulleted list and hyperlinks in this widget. Here is an example,
5. Link Boundaries
Other than the widgets mentioned above, this certainly is an awesome update with this WordPress 4.8 release. We often mess up with our content while adding or updating hyperlinks in the text. Sometimes the text goes out of the link, and sometimes the link covers the text outside it. And this really is frustrating. With the introduction of Link boundaries, this problem is gone. Now, whenever we click on a link inside the text, it will be highlighted as shown below
With this, it would be easy for us to know what text is covered under the hyperlink and easy to edit the hyperlink, without messing up the things.
Since using the new widgets is trivial and very easy, I didn’t go to add steps for using these widgets. However, if you feel the need of it, I would love to add them here. Please let me know through comments.
And that’s all for now!
