WordPress 3.4.1 Update Presentation To #WPMIA

meeting

A few weeks ago, in early July 2012, I was fortunate enough to be asked to present to the South Florida WordPress Meetup Group (#WPMIA of Facebook). The event organizers Jackie Jimenez and Rick Solari had asked if I could present details of the recent 3.4 (Green) update to WordPress. Prior to the actual event, WordPress released the 3.4.1 update with addressed some security issues, so we made sure to include these updates in the presentation as well.

The Meetup was scheduled with two presentations. The first was the WordPress update and the second was a fantastic presentation about the new Facebook Plugin for WordPress presented by Karla Kampos.
The meetup was held at the Dunkin Donuts conference room in Davie, FL. The room can accommodate 25 people and is properly furnished with a large conference table and several large screens. The meetup filled up to capacity a few days prior to the event and a second date was scheduled, so we got to put the presentation on twice.

WordPress Update 3.4 (Green) on Prezi

wpmia-soflaweb-presentation-small

Some Highlights from the WordPress Update presentation include:

End User Updates:

  • Theme Customizer with Live Preview
  • Real-time updates to your theme and inactive themes (easily test them before making changes live)
  • New Enhancements to Custom Header
  • Twitter Embeds
  • HTML support in photo captions – add links to your captions

Designer Updates:

  • Designers can now incorporate the customizable headers
  • Designers can incorporate the Live Theme Customizer into their own themes to allow more flexibility for the end user

Developer Updates:

  • Better page template organization
  • API updates
  • Updates to WordPress external libraries

Under the Hood:

  • Security updates
  • Core performance updates (specifically WP_Query function) which has increased overall speed and performance showing some pages and post loading 2-3 times faster than before.

steven-and-karla-at-wpmia

Finally we discussed a quick “best practice” for performing your updates on WordPress. The standard procedure we currently follow at South Florida Web Studio is:

  • Backup
  • Update Plugins
  • Turn off Plugins
  • Run Core Updates
  • Test Theme
  • Activate Plugins
  • Test

Categorized in: ,

Published On: Jul 22, 2012