WordPress 4.3 is here!

WordPress 4.3 has been released, and our Managed WordPress subscribers are already enjoying the benefits of this major release. The rollout to 4.3 to all our subscribers has begun and will be complete within 24 hours. The next time you login, you will benefit from these great new features.

If you are not yet experiencing the benefits of our Managed WordPress 4.3 Deployment and Hosting service, make sure you contact us today.

Here’s an overview of what’s new in WordPress 4.3

Easier In-line Text Formatting

WordPress 4.3 Editor

One of the key focuses of this upgrade has been on simplifying the process of formatting your content. This means the improved ability to format your text as you type, without ever having to stop and click with the mouse. A hyphenated list intelligently becomes a bullet list, a blockquote can be created with a > and ## lets you enter a heading. These are just a couple of examples how WordPress 4.3 is improving your workflow, helping you get things done quickly and easily.

Improved Customize Feature

Another way WordPress 4.3 improves the user experience is to enhance the “Customize” feature, allowing you to take control of your site or blog.

Site Icon CustomizerSite Icons / favicon

Upload your logo and let WordPress do the rest. Your site icons and favicon will be automatically generated and included in browser tabs, bookmark menus, and even on the home screen of mobile devices as the icon for your site. You no longer have to add a special module or hack up your theme code only to lose the settings after an update. Site Icons are now part of WordPress 4.3.

Customizer Menu FeatureMenus With Live Preview in Customizer

Now, you can preview your menu in Customizer as you add or edit items. The streamlined interface allows menu revision to easily take place on either desktop or mobile devices. Navigation creation continues to get easier and faster with WordPress 4.3.

Improved Security

WordPress 4.3: Better PasswordsPassword System Enhancements

A feature that has been sorely lacking from WordPress is password strength enforcement. WordPress 4.3 now generates strong passwords, and gives visual feedback to the user when they change their password as to whether their choice is weak or strong. In addition to this, plain-text passwords are no longer emailed to users, further protecting you. Now, if you forget your password, WordPress 4.3 will instead send you a password reset link. The password itself will not be revealed.

And That’s Not All

This is only an overview. Further refinements have been made to provide a smoother admin experience across all your devices, and overall the intuitiveness of WordPress 4.3 is a step in the right direction. From a more technical perspective, 180 bugs were fixed, and a final point worth mentioning is that WordPress 4.3 makes way for the upcoming PHP7 release by deprecating some old PHP4 style constructors. WordPress is now ready for the upgrade when it arrives later this year.

All in all, WordPress 4.3 is another great update from the WordPress team. Positive E Solutions Inc. keeps our customers current and protected through our Managed WordPress services.

Enjoy the new version! We look forward to hearing your feedback.

-Robbie

— Update Wednesday August 19, 2015 4:43pm —
All customer web sites on our Managed WordPress service have been upgraded to WordPress 4.3.

Find the version number of all WordPress installations on your Linux server.

I have a lot of customers running WordPress on our shared hosting servers, and sometimes they neglect to update their WordPress installs. [Rolls Eyes]

I need to know which of these sites are using an obsolete version of WordPress so I may contact the customer and warn them that they need to update their software.

So here’s a helpful little Linux command I whipped up and ran as root to go through my /home folder searching for all WordPress versions. I only had to run it as root because I am checking through all users’ folders, not just my own. If you only want to check your own user, you don’t need root access.

I ran this command from my /home folder on the Linux server:

find . -name ‘version.php’ -exec grep ‘$wp_version =’ {} /dev/null \; > /tmp/wordpress-versions.log

Breakdown:

  • find . -name ‘version.php’
    Search through the current folder, recursively, for any file named version.php. This is where WordPress stores the WordPress version number.
  • -exec
    Execute a command with each found item.
  • grep ‘$wp_version =’ {}
    Look within the found version.php file(s) in a loop for the term $wp_version = and output the result.
  • /dev/null
    Trick grep into thinking there is a second file, forcing it to precede the output with the filename provided by find
  • \;
    Close the find command.
  • > /tmp/wordpress-versions.log
    Save the results to a log file in /tmp. You can tail -f this file while scanning, or simply open or cat it when you’re done. Leave this portion out of the command if you’d rather have it output directly to your screen.