WordPress 4.0 Released
WordPress 4.0 was released today. This is a major release – version ‘4.0’ isn’t intended to be anything more significant than most other major releases (3.9 or the next, 4.1), but in contrast to the .0.1 updates it includes significant feature additions/changes.
The WordPress blog has a nice summary of the updates. To cover them quickly, there is a much prettier/easier to use media library, adding embedded content (such as Tweets or YouTube videos) has been made simpler, the post edit screen is better for writing, and the add plugin screen makes browsing plugins faster.
Major updates like this do not generally contain security changes and do not need to be applied immediately. It’s not unusual to see a few teething issues, particularly for the first few days. You can check this thread at WordPress.org, where issues can be reported, to see if any plugins you use might be a problem. Generally, as problems with plugins are reported, these plugins see updates that resolve the issue, and within a week or two most sites can safely upgrade.
We strongly encourage everyone to update once a few weeks have passed, as it’s generally a best practice to stay reasonably close to the most current version in order to be sure you can immediately apply any security updates that are released.
We have tested 4.0 here at Lightning Base and don’t expect to see any problems with our system. This site was updated earlier today, and the post here was composed on 4.0.
If you are set to receive our automatic updates, 4.0 will not be applied if you have configured minor updates only. For those of you that have selected all core updates, 4.0 will be rolled out to all sites either tonight or tomorrow night, depending upon the time zone of your server. As always, we do have backups available if anything goes wrong.
