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The latest update of WordPress, 3.9 ‘Smith’, changes the editing experience, but do you know how?

WordPress 3.9 was released last week and it has some major changes, mainly focused on the usability of the editor. We feel these improvements will help make the WordPress editing experience easier, especially regarding images, which has traditionally been a bit tricky.

Editor

The WordPress editor has been upgraded to use the TinyMCE version 4 editor (from TinyMCE 3 ), this has editor multiple improvements.

The first set of changes to note is in the actual icons on the editor ribbon.

Below is the 3.8.3 editor ribbon

and this is the 3.9 editor ribbon

First the ‘expanded’ mode icon moves over to the far right.

A new ‘horizontal row’ icon is added, this will insert a horizontal divider.

The ‘Insert from WordPress’ icon completely disappears, this is because the new editor is meant to be able to handle copy and paste from Word directly, creating a much cleaner markup. We still recommend that for best consistency across your site, you only paste as text and then apply formatting via the WordPress editor, but if you are confident in the consistency of fonts and styles in your word document, this might make your life easy if you have a lot of formatted word documents you need to insert.

And finally, the ‘Text Colours’ icon no longer has the ability to specify completely custom colours, instead you are restricted to 40 standard colours. We believe this is a good move as it remove the temptation to have too many colour variations. Of course custom colours can be created using HTML and CSS, but in general for your site to look good, it is best to stick to the site’s predefined styles.

Images

WordPress 3.9 has made multiple improvements to the way the media manager interacts with the editor, all designed to make image handling a bit easier.

Drag and Drop

Now you can simply drag and drop images from your computer into the editor workspace. Once ‘dropped’ the media manger will open up where you can set options and captions etc.

Re-sizing images

Now you can resize images in the editor workspace by dragging a corner or side out to the desired size.

Image Editor

The image editor has been restyle to be more intuitive and accessible. When you edit an image from the editor workspace the panel is simplified, and has a preview, but importantly also has a button to click through to the image editor, which whilst having the same features as before (crop, rotate, scale etc) is much cleaner and obvious.

Gallery Preview

In WordPress 3.8 a Gallery in the editor just showed as a grey box. This meant you couldn’t easily see what images were included. In 3.9 the Gallery now shows these images in a preview style in the editor workspace. Of course this isn’t WYSIWYG but a big step forward.

Other Changes in 3.9

There are several other changes in WordPress 3.9, but we won’t go into detail here as this article is focused on the user editing experience. Hover changes include introducing media playlists for video and audio, improving the theme selection screen and adding widget previews to the ‘customiser’

You can watch the official WordPress TV 3.9 video here.

25th April 2014
.UK Top Level Domain name coming soon, do I have to do anything?

On 10th June 2014 there will be a new Top Level Domain name (TLD) .uk . You may have seen many domain registrars urging you to pre register a .uk domain.

What do you have to do?

Up to 5 years – if you own a .co.uk, which has been registered before 28th October 2013. You have up to 5 years to claim the .uk.

Take action now – if you’ve registered your .co.uk today (or after 28th October 2013) you need to reserve the .uk too, as someone else could register it before you!

If you need help or advice on selecting your domain name please let us know.

3rd March 2014
How to set up an Auto Reply or Out of the Office message with Usermin
Usermin is the interface we provide for managing email directly on the server. There a couple of things that work well if done on the server, such as setting auto replies, this is because your PC or Laptop don’t need to be switched on to be able to send an automated email.

The two most common forms of auto replies people use are
1. a generic, thank you for your message we will get back to you shortly
2. an out of the office message,normally set for a specific date range
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The Usermin interface isn’t the most user friendly interface, but it is powerful and for the first option you would rarely change the reply message. However, for out of the office messages, there is a little tip that can help.

The key is understanding that all auto replies and auto forwarders are all, in fact, forms of message filters, and the filters section has far more options available that are not seen in the ‘Auto Reply’ tab.

The following video demonstrates how to set up an out of the office for a date range.

(note: whilst multisite.locally.uk enable filters, not all systems using UserMin will have these features turned on, so if you are reading this and can’t see these options, you wil need to talk to your systems administrator)
28th January 2014
Adding code to WordPress widgets.

Only certain levels of user can add complex code to their site, if you are at that level then it is relatively simple to add code snippets to your WordPress website by using the Text widget. (for our clients we recommend they talk to us before adding extra code ). Each WordPress theme should have one or more sidebars defined, and each of these sidebars can be used to contain multiple widgets.

A common request is to add some custom code to a WordPress website, and one way to achieve this is using the Text widget in a an appropriate sidebar.

In this video I will demonstrate adding Twitter widget code into a Footer sidebar of a WordPress site.

6th January 2014
WordPress Custom Menus – Adding a top level menu item

WordPress moved from a blogging platform to a CMS and website building tool when it released its custom menu feature back in June 2010 with WordPress 3.0.

Custom menus give easy control over the structure of page menus. Over the releases since 3.0 WordPress have improved the usability of the Custom Menu administration screen, found in Appearances>Menus.

Whilst being easy to use in many ways with drag and drop positioning, there are one or two tricks that are not obvious.

This short video demonstrates how to create a menu item, with sub menu items, where the top level menu is not actually a page.

Transcript:

“On this demo WordPress website, I have a fairly typical menu structure, with a Home page, About page, Services and Contact.

Under Services I have a couple of pages, one called First Services and Second Service.

But this is not actually how I want the site to look, because I don’t want the top menu item to link to a page at all, I just want it to be a holding menu item. So to achieve that, we need to go into the menu editor, and you will see here the typical setup with each item, Home , About, Services all pointing to page.

What we need to do is create a dummy menu item called Services, and we use the LINKS for this.

Now it is important that we put in the hash (#) or gate (#) symbol into the URL otherwise there will be problems on touch screen devices if you just leave this blank. And then we put in the text that we want to have for the menu item, and we add that to the menu. You will see that we have a custom menu item at the bottom here for Services.

We no longer need the page Services one, so we click on the little arrow there and then we remove Services.

Drag into the right position, drag these across into the correct place, and we save the menu.

With that done, we return back to the main site, we can see that the menus work as we expect, but if we click on Services nothing happens, but click on First Services we go to a page.

Obviously you can go and tidy up and remove your unneeded page, Services, leaving you with the menu structure as you need it to be.”

31st December 2013
WordPress 3.8 update

If you are currently subscribing to our on going maintenance and support plan, you may notice that the admin area of your website has had a bit of a refresh.

WordPress has recently released version 3.8 and after lots of testing from us, we have now updated all supported websites, you can watch the official video below:

Key updates:

Modern Design

WordPress needed a bit of a facelift, the grey gradients and dull icons quickly became outdated and proved to be not very user friendly.

Edit on the go

You can now edit pages, posts and more on mobile and tablet devices with ease. Before it was a bit of a thankless task, this update is arguably one of the most significant as smart phones and tablets become more popular.

8 admin colour schemes

By default we have our own admin panel called ‘Easy Mode’. We introduced this as WordPress was simply too grey and difficult to navigate. If you want to keep using Easy Mode you can, however, if you fancy trying out the new WordPress admin interface you can change your profile settings.

Images courtesy of WordPress

16th December 2013