WordPress 3.9 Update: version “Smith”
Reference: http://wordpress.org/news/2014/04/smith/
The new major WordPress 3.9 update is the next leap forward in making editing your WordPress site much easier. This update begins to close the gap between how things look when you are writing your post and how to looks when it is published to your website.
Visual Editor
The Visual Editor is now faster, is accessible from mobile, AND you can now copy and paste from Microsoft Word directly into the editor instead of having to go through the extra step of pasting it into the MS Word function to strip out the Word-only characters.
You can crop and rotate your images right from within the editor. So you just choose your image (upload or choose from the Media Library) and once it is in your post you click on it and have more editing tools.
And talking of images, you can now drag an image directly from your desktop and drop it into your post without having to go through the Media Library at all.
Galleries and Playlists
You can also display grids of gallery images, or create a mini gallery of images right inside your blog or page. No more will you have to use gallery plugin short codes or other workarounds.
And just like you can now group images, you can also create playlists of videos and audio files.
When Should I Update?
Now that is the question! My experience has been that WordPress engineers do a great job of making their updates quite stable before they release them so that is less of a concern then how a core update will effect the other plugins on your site. Here is the email I sent out to my WordPress clients about this very issue:
If you go into your WordPress admin you will see a notice at the top saying WordPress 3.9 is available! Please update now. This is a major update from 3.8
WordPress minor updates from, say, 3.8.8 to 3.8.9, are usually security updates that usually do not effect the plugins used on your website. However, the major updates have been known to break some plugins. My recommendation is to wait at least one week before updating to 3.9 as this will give plugin developers time to fix and update the plugins that are effected.
If you update yourself, prior to updating to 3.9 please use your backup plugin it make a full backup (database and files) as a safeguard if anything goes wrong.
