December has been a big month for WordPress! Right on the heals of WordCamp US 2015, WordPress 4.4, named “Clifford” in honor of jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown, was released. All 38solutions customers have been updated this weekend to the new release.
The most notable features for users will be the addition of responsive images and a new default theme, Twenty Sixteen. Responsive images will help your site load faster on mobile devices, improving overall performance.
Another new feature is an addition to the oEmbed functionality which now allows WordPress itself to be a source to easily embed posts from one WordPress site to another. For example, below is the result of just taking the WordPress.org announcement about version 4.4 and copying and pasting the post URL into this post.
This is a nice way to be able to easily reference another post and still give credit and attribution to the source.
There are some other very important “under the hood” improvements in version 4.4, including:
- REST API infrastructure
- Term meta
- Comment query improvements
- Term, comment, and network objects
While these don’t mean much to the average WordPress user or site admin, they are very important to WordPress developers. We will be benefiting from these improvements as plugin and theme authors are able to take advantage of the new capabilities.