I’d also be really interested to hear how people are getting on integrating with Active Directory – anyone got good stories of staff profiles working well?
We are using Active Directory Integration plug-in. It works well, with a few kinks depending on the AD environment and a lot of fiddling with the settings to pull in the user profiles. It does a bulk import and update to add new users and remove access for disabled users. Check it out.
You’re fine to update theme and plugin files to 4.9+
Check out Options, Modules for new features. You may need to switch on the A to Z option if you used this before. There are new post types, taxonomies, plugins and templates.