WordPress.org

WordPress 4.7 Beta 1 is now available!

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.7, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 4.7 is slated for release on December 6, but we need your help to get there. We’ve been working on a lot of things, many of them to make getting your site set up the way you want it much easier. Here are some of the bigger items to test and help us find as many bugs as possible in the coming weeks:

• Twenty Seventeen – A brand new default theme brings your site to life with immersive featured images, video headers, and subtle animations. With a focus on business sites, it features multiple sections on the front page as well as widgets, navigation and social menus, a logo, and more. Personalize its asymmetrical grid with a custom color scheme and showcase your multimedia content with post formats. Our default theme for 2017 works great in many languages, for any abilities, and on any device.
• Video Headers – Sometimes a big atmospheric video as a moving header image is just what you need to showcase your wares; go ahead and try it out with Twenty Seventeen. Need some video inspiration? Try searching for sites with video headers available for download and use.
• Set up your site in one flow – From finding and installing themes right inside the customizer, to automatically staged theme-specific starter content, to clickable shortcuts that jump directly to editing an item from the preview pane, to adding pages while you’re building a nav menu or setting a static front page: getting a new site spun up and ready to share with a friend or a coworker is faster and easier than it’s ever been. Note: starter content appears when live previewing brand new sites and is currently only available in Twenty Seventeen. We’ll be expanding this to other bundled themes very soon, and perhaps to sites with existing content in future releases of WordPress.
• Custom CSS with live previews – Ever needed to hide or tweak the look of something in your theme or from a plugin? Now you can do it with CSS and live preview the results while customizing your site. CSS can be a powerful tool; you may find that you won’t need the theme editor or child themes anymore.
• User admin languages – Just because your site is in one language doesn’t mean that everybody helping manage it prefers that language for their admin. To try this out, you’ll need to have more than one language installed, which will make a user language option available in your profile.
• PDF thumbnail previews – Uploading PDFs will now generate thumbnail images so you can more easily distinguish between all your documents.

As always, there have been exciting changes for developers to explore as well, such as:

• REST API content endpoints – If you only test one thing as a developer, please test these. This phase is particularly helpful for people building plugins, themes, and in-admin interfaces. Can you build the things you need? Are these ready for release, and is the world ready for them? (#38373)
• WP_Hook – The code that lies beneath actions and filters has been overhauled. You likely aren’t affected, but if you’ve done things to the $wp_filter global or experienced funky recursion bugs in the past, please take a moment to read the dev note and test your code.
• Custom bulk actions – List tables, now with more than bulk edit and delete.
• Expanded Settings Registration API via register_setting().
• For theme developers: Post type templates (#18375)
• More goodies for theme developers!
• Locale switching (#26511)
• Comment allowed checks have the potential for a back-compat break.

If you want a more in-depth view of what major changes have made it into 4.7, check out posts tagged with 4.7 on the main development blog, or look at a list of everything that’s changed. There will be more developer notes to come, so keep an eye out for those as well.

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.

Happy testing, and please enjoy this extended haiku break, courtesy of Rami Abraham.

Exquisite endpoints
Extol epic exabytes
Enabling earthlings

Careful interfaces
Considerately conjured
Customizer chic

Ring in the new year
With elegance and balance
Twenty Seventeen

Hooks hook healthily
17817
Sane iterations

Admin in your tongue
One site, many languages
We all speak WordPress