Version 3.4.2 of WordPress has been released – a security and maintenance recommended update. WordPress version 3.4 “Green” is a popular and growing blogging (and website) platform – a recent survey noted that 48 percent of Technorati’s top 100 blogs now use WordPress, up from 32% three years ago.
WordPress 3.4.2 should appear as an available update in your Admin dashboard or can be downloaded from WordPress.org here – it fixes 18 bugs and includes security fixes to harden WordPress. The vulnerabilities fixed included potential privilege escalation and a bug that affects multisite installs with untrusted users.
As this update covers security updates, it is strongly recommended to update to 3.4.2 as soon as possible – as always, you should take a backup of your site first in case of any issues with the upgrade process.
WordPress 3.4 included significant improvements to theme customization, custom headers, Twitter embeds, and image captions:
Enhanced theme control - Customize theme options before activating a new theme using Theme Customizer. Use Theme Previewer to customize current theme without changing the front-end design. This was the major change and, for most website publishers, the most interesting. The Customizer lets you test out different looks and settings for your current theme (or one you’re thinking about switching to) without having to publish those changes to the whole world.
It’s a great way of testing if that fuschia pink background you planned would really look good in practice… Now, instead of publishing the change (and then rushing to change it back…) you can now test the water without your visitors seeing any evidence of your fashion faux pas (even if you used to publish theme changes at the least busy time of day, some poor visitors would have been startled by your website design changing before their very eyes).
The Theme Customizer is available in WordPress Admin in the Appearance \ Themes section – click the Customize link under your current theme to open an active preview of your site with design options.
- Custom Headers – Improved Custom Headers with flexible sizes
- Media improvements – Support HTML in image captions
- Technical ‘under the hood’ improvements to WordPress internationalization and localization, faster translations and WP_Query improvements.
WordPress 3.4 Video highlights:
See the full WordPress 3.4 codex site here for extended details.