Christmas has come early! The latest version of the worlds most popular website content management system, WordPress 4.7, is now available for download and/or automatic update.

With the new year coming up quick, WordPress has also revealed their default theme for 2017 – Twenty Seventeen. Here’s a quick look at what Twenty Seventeen looks like across both a desktop and mobile platform:

As usual with WordPress, their default themes can be personalised with social menus, logos, custom colours, widgets, navigation changes, and much more customisation.

All New Customisation Experience

On the point of customisation, the entire end-to-end process of setting up a new WordPress theme has been reconfigured. Now, themes provide placeholder content that appears when you enter customisation mode. This gives site owners, and developers, the opportunity to arrange the homepage content in different ways without the requirement to change anything on the live site.

When in customisation mode, a series of editing shortcuts will appear on the left-hand side indicating what’s available for quick editing. Click on one of the shortcuts to begin editing on the spot. Here’s an example of what it looks like in action, note the blue circular icons:

Custom Coding

One can also now easily add custom CSS to your site and then get a live preview of what those changes will look like, before taking it live. This seems to be a much more efficient process than the older method, which involved refreshing the page over and over again.

Video in Headers

WordPress 4.7 now allows videos to be used as header media as opposed to the traditional header image. This can be accomplished through uploading your own video in MP4 format or providing the link to a YouTube video.

Smart Menu Building

Sometimes you have an idea for how you want a site to be laid out before you have the actual content for the site. Now, when you create navigation menus in WordPress, you can create new pages on the fly. When you publish your changes, the new pages will be ready for you in the back end to add content to.

More Tweaks

A couple of other back end tweaks include the addition of thumbnail previews for PDFs. So now PDFs will appear just like images and videos in the media library.

There’s now also the ability to add new languages to the admin area of a site. As the company points out, this is helpful if a diverse team helps manage a website and prefers different languages to the one the site is written in.

For more technical details behind the WordPress 4.7 update, see the company’s official announcement.