Improving visuals, perfecting the interface so it would be more and more intuitive, and providing help at your fingertips – WordPress guys are as diligent and conscientious as ever.

A brand new version of the most popular Content Management System is banging on our doors. The “Sassy” 4.7 version is to be replaced with a “smaller” release of 4.8, which will hit the dashboards around June 8. The official beta version is already out there for anyone to give it a try via the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.

According to WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg, major improvements that are going to arrive by default are:

• A slightly better visual editor in the Text Widget, which is even more beginner-friendly than ever before. Whereas they will be able to add links, make their text bold or italic without writing the code for it, the possibility of confusion between visual (WYSIWG – “What You See Is What You Get”) and text editor will be reduced.
• WordPress News & Events widget. So far, the users have been served news only on their dashboards. Now you will be able to check out about the events, meetups and camps organized near you by the WordPress community. All it takes is to provide your location.
• Media-friendliness is a must these days, so the devs have made it easier than before to upload images and videos to the sidebar. A plugin will no longer be needed for that. It is going to be as simple as pie: upload the media file in the widget, preview, save.

Apparently, for a great number of developers this piece of news was a red alarm that something is about to break. There wasn’t enough time for all the testing. But Mullenweg explained that this release was not supposed to be a bomb anyway. Small improvements shouldn’t be delayed because some major problems need more time for solving.

“I think people are thinking of this as a normal release, a train leaving the station that a bunch of stuff (multisite! meta!) has to get on to make it in. I agree that needs a much longer timeframe. What is really going on is that we have a few simple, already working as plugin enhancements that add a few files, and we want to get those in the hands of users sooner rather than later,” wrote Mullenweg in the dev chat.

So, we will patiently wait for a new sensational jazzy release at the end of the year. (If you are interested in the history of WordPress, we recommend you to take a look at our infographic about its most amazing jazzy releases.)

As always, we recommend a nice and firm backup before updating to the new version.

Have you already tried the Beta 4.8? If yes, we’d like to read about it in the comments below!