Photo by LEOL30 on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Early Tues­day morn­ing, I deployed the Word­Press 3.4.1 update. Users should not notice any changes to nor­mal work­flow. There may be a few blue and white pop-ups in the admin inter­face that call atten­tion to new fea­tures. In the admin tool­bar, if you hover over the Word­Press logo in the top left cor­ner, you should see an “About Word­Press” link that lists all of the new fea­tures. In this post I will demo a cou­ple of the new features.

First, take a look at the Cap­tion for the metal house num­ber photo in this post. At long last, authors can use basic HTML tags in image cap­tions. Now you can ital­i­cize titles, insert a line break, or add a linked attri­bu­tion for shared images.

The next new fea­ture is Twit­ter Embeds. They work just like oEm­beds for videos. Just paste a raw (unlinked) tweet URL on its own line in a post or page. The pub­lished entry dis­plays a styl­ish box with the tweet, the Twit­ter avatar, and some action links for the tweet. For an exam­ple, check out the meta tweet below:

We’ve upgraded the Word­Press sys­tem to 3.4.1. Read about what’s new: blogs.princeton.edu/blog/2012/07/w…

— Prince­ton­Web­Ser­vices (@PrincetonWDS) July 24, 2012

With Cus­tom Head­ers, you no longer have to set­tle for the same height ban­ner image on every page. You can still use the “PUWS Options” in our Princeton-customized themes, but that height value just acts as a sug­gested height. When you upload a ban­ner image, the sys­tem will ask you if you want to crop the image to that sug­gested height or use the image’s orig­i­nal height. Please note that this will not work well for tall images.

Live Theme Pre­views allow you to try out a new look for your site before mak­ing those changes live. Not all cus­tom theme set­tings are avail­able with the live pre­views and the Cus­tomizer side­bar. Sur­pris­ingly, any cus­tom CSS saved under the “Edit CSS” Appear­ance page should dis­play in the Live Preview.

The next fea­ture update for Word­Press is ver­sion 3.5, set for release Decem­ber 5. Bar­ring any devel­op­ment delays, we should be deploy­ing this ver­sion (or a sub­se­quent bug fix release) to the net­work soon after the holidays.