About mid-way through last week, WordPress 3.4 ‘Green’ was released! If you hadn’t heard already, the reason behind the naming of this version is due to the soulful jazz artist; Grant Green, whose music kept the developers over at WordPress at bay during the production of this release.

With this new release comes some great features that all WordPress users and developers will be excited about. If you haven’t upgraded already, I highly recommend you get the update and start taking advantage of the new features below.

Arguably, quite possibly the best feature that has been released across the WordPress 3.x platform. Have you been looking for a theme in the theme directory and wandered what it would look like with your current content? Or have you downloaded 30 themes to find that you really only want to use 1 of them? No longer do you need to worry about this.

What you need to do to see the new Theme Customizer with Live Preview, is head over to Appearance > Themes and you will see ‘Live Preview’ link underneath your themes. For any loaded theme, you will see a new link right underneath the description called ‘Customize’.

Once you click on the ‘Customize’ or ‘Live Preview’ buttons you will be taken to a new screen where you can edit any available options in real-time. You can then save your options and activate your newly edited theme. There’s a great article that shows just how to utilize the theme customizer in your themes – Otto goes into great detail about this new tool and has some great content directed to developers. However, he created a video that shows just how the Customizer is used, which is located at the top of this post.

When WordPress 2.1 came out a new theme feature was introduced, the custom header. This is the image that is shown in the theme’s top header section. You can see how to implement a custom header into your theme.

The greatest thing about the update to Custom Headers is that they are now flexible. What this means is that previously they had to be a specific width and height and if you didn’t have the dimensions right your blog would look off.

Have you ever tried to post a link in the caption to the author of a photo you have added to your post? Or just wanted to provide a link to another website or post from the caption of your photo?

With WordPress 3.4 you can now add HTML into your captions. So you can now credit your sources!

Previously if you wanted to embed your tweets into your posts, you’d have to download and install a plugin. A new format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL, known as oEmbed has made this possible. It is now easier than ever to include a tweet into your posts… All you have to do is simply take the link to your tweet and add it on a new line in your post editor.

The Top 7 WordPress Social Media Plugins: Free traffic, that is the most important thing for any blogger.. simplewpgenius.com/?p=465

— SimpleWPGenius (@SimpleWPGenius) June 6, 2012

Note: In order for your Tweet to show, make sure you remove the link so it is simply shown as text. e.g. http:// twitter.com/SimpleWPGenius/status/210249549372063744 (I put a space in so it wouldn’t load the tweet)

There was a huge number of updates in development, themes and plugins. Not to mention a heap of additional feature updates that I simply just can’t cover here.

Click to view a full list of updates for WordPress 3.4

There are some additional resources below which helped in the creation of this post.

How to leverage the Theme Customizer in your own themes
WordPress 3.4 “Green” – Release
What’s New in WordPress 3.4

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