What's new in WordPress 4.7 for Content Creators

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome to our first Webinar at NPTechProjects and WP4Good Club! We are very grateful that you are able to join us today and dive into What’s new in WordPress 4.7 which was released just a week ago. My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack and I am one of the founders of NPTechProjects. Another founder Jim O’Reilley is also with us today. He’ll keep an eye on the chat window and might answer to your comments, too.
• #3: A few words to the interface here in Expertise.tv the platform we use for our online webinars. Thank you all for answering our initial poll. It’s very interesting to see how often you are using WordPress Admin sections. We’ll share the results in a bit.
• #4: Now that you entered the space, I already started the slide show in the big space to the left. I use a screen sharing method, so I can also do some demos later on. That’s the reason your see some browser tabs on top of the slide deck. The slide deck is available to you as well, and I’ll share the link in a bit. To your right you see a chat room where you can leave comments. Why don’t we try it out. Everyone please write where you are located, with city and state. Fabulous. That seems to be working;-) You also see a “Questions” Tab, that where we collect your question for our Q & A section of this webinar in about 25 minutes. Your questions can be about anything WordPress and publishing online. Or any other burning technology question you might have. I will pause every few and look at the comments and see if there are question in the immediate context.
• #5: And the slides are available at this link if you want to follow along and for later review. https://nptp.us/slideswp47 I also added it to the webinar chat window
• #6: Before we start on WordPress let me tell you what we do at NPTechProjects. It is a 501(c)(3) organization and was founded in 2015 by a group of technology strategist and practitioners who see a great need to raise the digital literacy in nonprofit leadership and communicators. In helping nonprofits with their website, we also want to improve nonprofit communication, proficiency in online fundraising and collaboration with online ambassadors carrying the cause further into the world. We have two programs right now. One is WP4 Good Club and the others is “Impact Circles”
• #7: WP4Good Club provides to its members Subscription to Nonprofit Technology news around WordPress Also provides what we call ‘peace of mind’ hosting and server administration of their website. In addition we provide e-mail support, office hours and training material to content producers and advice in all things WordPress as well as tangential topics, like social media integration, CRM integration and online payment systems.
• #8: The Second program is Impact Circles - a monthly roundtable for executive directors as peer-to-peer group to discuss strategy and operations and how technology can help with process optimization, knowledge transfer and operation and measuring programs. During our pilot season last spring and summer, we received great feedback and tremendous encouragement to make it a permanent program. Right now we are fundraising for scholarships to give to 20 Executive Directors of small and new organizations who might not be able to afford participation otherwise, or convince their own board that it is necessary. Jim O’Reilley, one of the founders of NPTechProjects and facilitator of Impact Circles, and I talked about it in detail in our #9th episode of the NPTechProjects podcast. Listen in and learn more. And of course we hope that you, too, will support nonprofits executive directors and donate to our scholarship fund.
• #9: Let’s get started with the main topic. WordPress 4.7 is called Vaughan. For those of you who haven’t seen the release video - Let’s watch it together! (video uploaded to expertise.tv) ---- What do you think about the video? What’s the most appealing feature you heard about in this video. Add it in the comment section.
• #10: Actually the video only covered only a fraction of the new things available. The list of changes in WordPress 4.7 is huge, and some of it is really exciting. Today, we will only cover the parts that are interesting to you as content creators. We have a new theme, targeting small businesses and you saw it already in the video . We’ll talk about the Customizer’s changes, and We’ll look at the updates to the text editor works and enhanced PDF viewer in the Media Library.
• #11: This Theme is the first default theme that is geared towards businesses and the small business owner in mind who puts their own website together. It was created by over 100 contributors under the lead of Mel Choyce, a User interface designer from Boston. What’s new for themes is the Video header you can upload instead of a static graphic.
• #12: With the Twenty Seventeen theme you can have a Video header very easily: So when I first tried this out it didn’t work as you can see in this animated gif: https://i2.wp.com/g.recordit.co/nZu9rguSzX.gif The problem here was that was too large to upload to my site. Your site might have an upload file size limit, too and it’s hard to get around that. But you can use a YouTube video: Let me show you that instead. https://youtu.be/wKIpyys85uM
• #13: The Customizer is a way to change the appearance of your website and preview the changes as you are making them. WordPress started to add the customizer into the core in version 3.4 and for quite a while I have been reluctant to use it. I always use the previous admin functionality to change widgets and menus. Only recently I have gained a great appreciation for the customizer, and have since shown it to many users when they wanted to update their menus and widget sections themselves. I am switching from the presentation to a screen share and show you a few things: among them the new shortcuts for edits icons, how to create a menu and if you are starting out to create your pages. And how to change your widgets.
• #15: The Editor Toolbar has changed And in this slide I put in for comparison sake the new toolbar on top and the old one on the bottom on the screen I marked the change with green and red dotts. The drop down box the allows you to assign heading formatting to your subheaders is now on the top row. That way it’s visible to all content creators and makes it easier to use. To make room for it, the horizontal line button and the Strikethrough formatting button move into the second row. Two buttons were removed: The underlinie button. Nowadays, underlingin text for emphasis has been confusing. Most users associate with underlining now links to other pages and are confused when they can’t click on underlined text. The second button is the Justified formatting button, which has never really worked well in HTML and with fluid screen sized and seized to have any value what so ever.
• #16: Another change to the editor, you see is that the Keyboard shortcuts are listed with the drop downs or in the hover of the bottons. This way you can better learn them, and appreciate its usfulness when you have to do a lot of typing and don’t want to change between keyboard and mouse and just use the keyboard shortcuts. A full list of the Keyboard shortcuts for the WordPress editor is available in the WordPress Codex:
• #17: The main change on the Media Library is how PDF documents are displayed to you. The old way left a lot to be desired in terms of useful ness. If you didn’t knoe the file name of the documents you wanted to include it wasn’t really easy to find it.
• #18: The 4.7 update enables the media library to show you previews of the first page of your PDF document. Similar as you see of your images And when you upload it you also see larger representation of the front page. Now there is a caveat: In order to generate the previews, the web hosting server needs to support Imagick, ImageMagick, and Ghostscript. It might very well be that our server is not supporting this. It runs a rather old version of PHP. Not everyone is hosted on the most current PHP version so this might not yet be available to you, even after you update to 4.7