WordPress 4.5 arrives with editing improvements, custom logos, and responsive previews

WordPress.org today launched WordPress 4.5, which adds a slew of new features to the blog management tool to “streamline your workflow, whether you’re writing or building your site.” You can download the new release now from WordPress.org/Download (8.0MB).

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that powers 25 percent of the Web. The latest version is dubbed “Coleman,” in honor of jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.

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WordPress 4.5 brings two editing improvements. First up is Inline Linking, which offers a less distracting interface for adding links to your content.

The other is adding two new formatting shortcuts. Three dashes will add a horizontal line, and you can finally use the code tag.

In the customization area, themes can now support logos for your business or brand. To try this out, you’ll need to use either the Twenty Sixteen or Twenty Fifteen theme in the Site Identity section of the customizer.

Related to customization, but worth its own call out, is Live Responsive Previews. You can now preview mobile, tablet, and desktop views directly in the customizer.

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Last, but not least, there are a number of under-the-hood improvements:

• Smart Image Resizing: Generated images now load up to 50 percent faster with no noticeable quality loss.
• Selective Refresh: The customizer now supports a comprehensive framework for rendering parts of the preview without rewriting your PHP code in JavaScript.
• Script Loader Improvements: Better support has been added for script header/footer dependencies. New wp_add_inline_script() enables adding extra code to registered scripts.
• Better Embed Templates: Embed templates have been split into parts and can be directly overridden by themes via the template hierarchy.
• JavaScript Library Updates: jQuery 1.12.3, jQuery Migrate 1.4.0, Backbone 1.2.3, and Underscore 1.8.3 are bundled.

WordPress 4.6 is already in the works, though the company didn’t specify a month for its release. That said, we would estimate it probably won’t be out before July.