WordPress 3.4 was released yesterday with some very cool and exciting new features. A breakdown of all the features can be found in the WordPress Codex, and Aaron Brazell wrote a good blog post about it as well.

One of the seemingly minor, but never-the-less cool features is that Twitter was added as an oEmbed provider. What this means is that, like with YouTube, Vimeo, etc, you can simply include the url to an individual tweet in your post and it will be displayed as it looks in your Twitter feed. See below for examples.

WordPress 3.4 is here! Update your site now to try the new theme customizer, better headers, HTML captions & more: wp.me/pZhYe-BE

— WordPress(@WordPress) June 13, 2012

WordPress 3.4, codename “Green”, is released: wordpress.org/news/2012/06/g… Will update tomorrow!

— Zach Hogan (@zach_hogan) June 13, 2012

One of the major additions in the WordPress 3.4 release is the Theme Customizer. This is a very cool, and very useful new feature that allows you to make changes to the appearance of your theme and view them in realtime, but without publishing the changes. Once you’ve adjusted the changes to your liking, you can click publish. This is a very useful and powerful tool that will allow WordPress users to easily make adjustments to their themes, without detracting from the user experience of visitors on their site. Daryl Koopersmith, a WordPress core developer, has already written a great plugin for the Theme Customizer. The plugin, simply called CSS, adds a CSS editor to the Theme Customizer, giving users even more granular control over the appearance of their themes.

Those are just a couple of the many new features added to WordPress 3.4. I encourage all of you to read about the other features in the Codex, and to upgrade to 3.4 so that you can enjoy these new features.