WordPress 3.4 was released on June 13, 2012 and I advised all of my readers and clients to wait a week to 10 days BEFORE making the decision to update their WordPress installations. Good news!! I just finished updating over 2 dozen client sites and it has been flawless!! It appears that all of the plugins I recommend have been updated in record time and there are no glitches and hangups!!
Watch the video to get an overview of all the really cool new features!!
The biggest change in 3.4 is the theme customizer which allows you to play around with various looks and settings for your current theme or one you’re thinking about switching to without publishing those changes to the whole world. For themes that support it, you can change colors, backgrounds, and of course custom image headers. WordPress has more planned for the customizer down the road.
Throughout the rest of the admin you’ll notice tweaks to make your everyday life easier. For example, if you have lots of themes we’ve made it quicker to browse them all at once without paging. WordPress has made it possible to use images from your media library to populate custom headers, and for you to choose the height and width of your header images.
WordPress has expanded the embed support to include tweets: just put a Twitter permalink on its own line in the post editor and it will be turned into a beautiful embedded Tweet. And finally, image captions have been improved to allow HTML, like links, in them.
Here is the step-by-step procedure I personally use to update a site and it is the one I recommend that others use too! Be forewarned – this is not a quick update if you have alot of plugins. So give yourself enough time to do this correctly and it will save you alot of time and headaches in the long run!
- Backup your site
- Deactivate all of your plugins
- Upgrade your WordPress Install to 3.4 (very easy to do from within your dashboard)
- When you get the “Site Successfully Updated” message, reactivate your plugins ONE-BY-ONE. There are some plugins that will need to have their settings updated as well.
- Create a new backup of your site
- You are DONE!!
Several themes, including Thesis, have released updates to take advantage of these new features.
Need help with your upgrades? Contact me if you need assistance. Site maintenance, backups and upgrades are just one of the services I offer.
Get your site updated and let me know how it goes!! Let me know what you think of 3.4!
Updating Your Site To WordPress 3.4 bit.ly/Li3WYO
— Rose_Mis (@Rose_Mis) June 21, 2012
Thanks for all you do Rose! I took your advice and waited to update and just as you said when I did it was flawless!! Not so sure about updating my Thesis theme! Ha! But I know just who to call on to help me with that! I appreciate you!!
The next post that I do will go over the steps to updating Thesis 🙂 … LOL … I may be over cautious, but taking things one step at a time makes all this much more manageable and reduces the risk of problems with these updates!! It is an honor to be able to help you Denny!!
Rose I like your explanation. As always clear, step by step methods. I haven't updated my site. Will follow your steps this weekend. Look forward to your next post on Thesis. Thanks Rose 🙂
Good Morning Rose…Thank you for sharing this insight on upgarding to WordPress 3.4! …Hughie 🙂
Great post and useful information Rose! I agree with Claudia – As always clear, step by step methods. Thank you!
Thankyou so much Rose for your clear and concise info, for those of us 'do it yourselfers'.
Being on the "bleeding edge" of any of these updates is unnerving for some of us. But if we don't update, we put our security at greater risk. Enter Rose … and once she gives us the green light, that means GO! Thanks, Rose!
Ok Rose. I just learned something.
I never took updating my WordPress site too seriously. I would just press the update button without fan fair. Thanks for the detailed instructions on how to properly update a site.
Great blog, and informative at the same time.