Version 4.7 of WordPress, named “Vaughan” in honor of legendary jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.7 help you get your site set up the way you want it.

Presenting Twenty Seventeen

A brand new default theme brings your site to life with immersive featured images and video headers.

Twenty Seventeen focuses on business sites and features a customizable front page with multiple sections. Personalize it with widgets, navigation, social menus, a logo, custom colors, and more. Our default theme for 2017 works great in many languages, on any device, and for a wide range of users.

Your Site, Your Way

WordPress 4.7 adds new features to the customizer to help take you through the initial setup of a theme, with non-destructive live previews of all your changes in one uninterrupted workflow.

Theme Starter Content

To help give you a solid base to build from, individual themes can provide starter content that appears when you go to customize your brand new site. This can range from placing a business information widget in the best location to providing a sample menu with social icon links to a static front page complete with beautiful images. Don’t worry – nothing new will appear on the live site until you’re ready to save and publish your initial theme setup.

Edit Shortcuts https://wordpress.org/news/files/2016/12/edit-shortcuts.mp4 Visible icons appear to show you which parts of your site can be customized while live previewing. Click on a shortcut and get straight to editing. Paired with starter content, getting started with customizing your site is faster than ever.

Video Headers https://wordpress.org/news/files/2016/12/video-headers.mp4 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.

Smoother Menu Building Many menus for sites contain links to the pages of your site, but what happens when you don’t have any pages yet? Now you can add new pages while building menus instead of leaving the customizer and abandoning your changes. Once you’ve published your customizations, you’ll have new pages ready for you to fill with content.

Custom CSS Sometimes you just need a few visual tweaks to make your site perfect. WordPress 4.7 allows you to add custom CSS and instantly see how your changes affect your site. The live preview allows you to work quickly without page refreshes slowing you down.

PDF Thumbnail Previews Managing your document collection is easier with WordPress 4.7. Uploading PDFs will generate thumbnail images so you can more easily distinguish between all your documents.

Dashboard in your language Just because your site is in one language doesn’t mean that everybody helping manage it prefers that language for their admin. Add more languages to your site and a user language option will show up in your user’s profiles.

Introducing REST API Content Endpoints

WordPress 4.7 comes with REST API endpoints for posts, comments, terms, users, meta, and settings.

Content endpoints provide machine-readable external access to your WordPress site with a clear, standards-driven interface, paving the way for new and innovative methods of interacting with sites through plugins, themes, apps, and beyond. Ready to get started with development? Check out the REST API reference.

Even More Developer Happiness 😊

By opening up the page template functionality to all post types, theme developers have even more flexibility with the WordPress template hierarchy.

More Theme API Goodies

WordPress 4.7 includes new functions, hooks, and behavior for theme developers.

List tables, now with more than bulk edit and delete.

The code that lies beneath actions and filters has been overhauled and modernized, fixing bugs along the way.

Settings Registration API

register_setting() has been enhanced to include type, description, and REST API visibility.

Customize changesets make changes in the customizer persistent, like autosave drafts. They also make exciting new features like starter content possible.

The Squad

This release was led by Helen Hou-Sandí, backed up by Jeff Paul and Aaron Jorbin as Release Deputies, and with the help of these fine individuals. There are 482 contributors with props in this release—the most ever—with 205 of them contributing for the first time. Pull up some sassy Sarah Vaughan on your music service of choice, and check out some of their profiles:



Special thanks go to Rami Abraham for producing the release video and the many fine haiku we saw in the beta and RC announcement posts.

Finally, thanks to all the community translators who worked on WordPress 4.7. Their efforts bring WordPress 4.7 fully translated to 52 languages at release time with more on the way. Additionally, the WordPress 4.7 release video has been captioned into 44 languages.

If you want to follow along or help out, check out Make WordPress and our core development blog. Thanks for choosing WordPress – we hope you enjoy!

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