14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress 4.3, nicknamed "Billie" in honor of jazz singer Billie Holiday, has recently been released to the public, and it's all about broadening the customization and editing features provided to users.
We previously reported about 4.3's ongoing development, but now the final release is up for grabs, being downloaded 1.6 million times in the first 24 hours and almost reaching 2.4 million downloads in the first two days.
WordPress Billie comes with lots of new features, as a 4.x minor version should do, the most important of which is its overhauled password system.
WordPress now comes with a password generator
With WordPress 4.3, the dev team added a very capable password generation tool, one that generates passwords that are not only more secure but also longer than your average pass phrases.
These are somewhat harder to remember, but it will take a whole lot more than 30 minutes to be cracked open by hackers (that's for sure).
Additionally, to enhance user privacy, when resetting passwords, instead of sending the new pass phrase via email, users will receive a password reset link inside their mails.
These two changes should help keep WP admin and user accounts safer, which have been under a constant barrage of brute-force attacks and hacking attempts in the past years.
Finally, you can set a custom favicon in WordPress
But the new features don't stop here. After spending a few years in the WordPress feature request forum, somebody in the WP dev team was kind enough to add a favicon option in the site's settings. This is long overdue in our opinion, but we're happy to finally have this feature added to the WP backend.
On top of this, basic Markdown support has been added to the built-in WYSIWYG editor to speed up the writing process, and users can now also edit and preview the site's menu from the CMS' Customizer feature.
Other noticeable changes include an always-present link to the site's Customizer, which can be accessed from wherever you are on the site, small tweaks to the site's admin panel to make it more mobile-friendly, and (finally) comments are now turned off by default for WP pages.
WordPress can be downloaded from Softpedia, GitHub, or the official website.
