Theme related news
First of all, a new default theme is being introduced: Twenty Fifteen. It is designed beautifully and fits well with the whole direction of WordPress internationalization. It uses Google’s Noto Serif and Sans fonts which support many languages, so that there is no need to adjust fonts for your language (a well-known problem for users who publish in languages with non-latin alphabets).![tf8](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2014/12/tf8.jpg)
- thepostnavigation - should be used in the single post template to create next and previous post links;
- thepostsnavigation - should be used in archive templates to create links to next and previous archive pages;
- the_pagination - numbered paging links for archives, the implementation of which can be seen in the Twenty Fifteen theme.
![paging](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2014/12/paging.png)
Dashboard features
There were various improvements to language pack support in recent releases. In 4.1 this trend goes further and users now can download appropriate language packs from wordpress.org directly when changing them on the Settings screen. The only possible issue in the process is the correct writing permissions.![lang-pack-ui](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2014/12/lang-pack-ui.png)
![img-edit](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2014/12/img-edit.png)
![session-ui](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2014/12/session-ui.png)
For developers
Developers may welcome the improvements for _Query classes that allow nested queries to be built based on taxonomy, metadata and date. For example, let’s suppose that you have posts with ‘city’ and ‘state’ metadata, and you want to fetch all items that match either city=Miami&state=Ohio or city=Augusta&state=Maine. The syntax should look like this:$query = new WPQuery( array( 'metaquery' => array( 'relation' => 'OR', array( 'relation' => 'AND', array( 'key' => 'city', 'value' => 'Miami', ), array( 'key' => 'state', 'value' => 'Ohio', ), ), array( 'relation' => 'AND', array( 'key' => 'city', 'value' => 'Augusta', ), array( 'key' => 'state', 'value' => 'Maine', ), ), ), ) );The same functionality exists for the taxonomy query and date query with additional bug fixes, a complete record of which can be seen here. The second ‘big’ and widely discussed change is the introduction of shared terms — which means that you can have two terms with the same name and slug belonging to different taxonomies. It aims to handle the case when changes in one set of shared terms don’t affect other terms. Term splitting is still in beta versions but may be removed from the final release in the case of negative feedback. So theme and plugin developers are heavily encouraged to test their products thoroughly. The Kubric theme set the practice of outputting the content of <title> tag with the addition of some custom code. Because there is no consistency in such an approach it leads to problems for users when they would like to use SEO plugins or have complex structure in their titles. Now things are going to change with the introduction of the ‘theme support’ approach to output the <title> tag. Starting with 4.1 the recommended way for themes to display titles is as follows:
function themeslugsetup() { addthemesupport( 'title-tag' ); } addaction( 'aftersetuptheme', 'themeslug_setup' );By declaring support like this, themes acknowledge that they are not defining titles on their own and WordPress (or a plugin) can add it safely without duplication. More details on backward compatibility can be found here. In addition to all these great things the recent beta contains all security fixes that were introduced in the 4.0.1 upgrade.
Anna Ladoshkina
Anna Ladoshkina is a freelance web designer and developer who likes to build pretty things with WordPress and write about it. Connect with Anna on Twitter (@foralien) or on her website, www.foralien.com.
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