Top 3 Most Useful Features in WordPress 3.4 You’ll Love

WordPress 3.4 was released yesterday and as usual there are a whole bunch of new features added to it. Many are developer features that you may not use directly, but there are some great new features for end users. Here are our favorite three.

Easy Twitter Embeds

Finally! An easy way to embed Tweets on your site. Just paste a tweet URL on its own line and WordPress will automatically embed it.

Pasting this on a line of its own…

http://twitter.com/ClickWP/status/213092284793749504

..automatically turns into this

WordPress 3.4 is out! Check out the new features, backup your site and upgrade! fb.me/18e8xEqEY

— ClickWP (@ClickWP) June 14, 2012

The embedded tweet includes action links that allow readers to reply to, retweet, and favorite the tweet without leaving your site. Neat huh?

FYI you can use this technique to embed videos and images from popular websites too.

Live Theme Preview

This feature allows you to see how new themes would look without activating them on your site.

To try out this feature, click the Live Preview link under the theme name in your Dashboard → Appearance. After customizing the theme, you can click Save & Activate to immediately deploy the customizations.

Better Custom Headers

For themes that support this feature, you can upload a custom header image to replace the one that comes by default with the theme. Previously you had to make sure your custom header image was the exact height as what the theme required it to be. Now you can upload custom headers of any height and the theme will adjust to it. Note that not all themes support this feature.

Here’s a short and sweet video that explains all these features.

ClickWP support plan customers can enjoy these features right now

We’ve spent the day updating all of our customer’s WordPress sites so now these features are available to you. Enjoy the new features in WordPress 3.4!