This new release offers you some cool features like tweaking your theme and being able to preview those changes before committing to them, changing your blogsites’ header and a really simple way to add tweets to your posts.

First let’s look at the new theme features.

Live Theme Previews

Now you can make changes to your theme, or try out a new theme, play around with it and then decide if you want to make these changes public. There are many options to “play” with. They will change based on the theme you are working on but here are a list of some of the options I have seen:

• Site Title & Tagline

• Colors ie. header text, background color (the far left and right hand sides – not where your content goes) & link text

• Layout ie. sidebar on the left or right, or disable the sidebar from appearing on your default pages (this means it will disable it on your whole site. It won’t disable it just on certain pages.)

• Header Image – change your image or remove it completely.

• Background Image

• Navigation ie. which menu (from appearances -> menu) you want to use as your primary navigation/menubar

• Static front page ie. choose from your latest blog posts appearing on your home page or a WordPress “Page” such as a “Welcome” page.

Once you are ready to make your changes “live” click “Save & Publish” or click “Cancel” if you aren’t ready for any changes yet.

Custom Headers

Now you can change your header image on the spot and alter how tall or wide you want your image to be.

This feature only works for themes that have this functionality enabled. Your current theme probably doesn’t have this enabled, but any theme to be released in the near future will most likely include this option!

Better Image Captions

Now you can add html to your image captions. Take a look at the screenshot I added above. It not only has a short description of what the image is but I added a link to download WordPress 3. 4 and I bolded “Live Theme Preview” using html. I did this by adding html code to the “caption” field. Check out the screenshot below for a better visual.

Twitter Embeds

Now you can show off specific tweets and let your blogsite visitors follow, reply, retweet or favorite your tweet right from your blog. Oh and any links in the tweet work! How great is that?
All you need to do is grab the url for your tweet ie: https://twitter.com/TechCoach/status/212998120257241088, and place it right in your post or page. That’s it.

Other Updates

There are other updates that are very techie in nature. I’ll spare you the details. Just know that WordPress is faster and better than ever!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2012 at 10:30 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Marketing Essentials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.