What’s new in WordPress 4.4.?

After four months of hard work and 4 beta versions, WordPress has already released WordPress 4.4 dedicated to another jazz musician – Clifford Brown.

The newly integrated and improved features bring a wide range of benefits for both – bloggers and developers. So let’s see what awaits there for you!

The new WordPress release consists of a few key new features that are going to simplify and fasten routine developing tasks.

To begin with, WordPress REST API has been integrated into the core of the system.

Even though the endpoints are still in progress, the infrastructure has already been integrated. Together with this new feature, everyone can build RESTful APIs much easier as it handles the routing and arguments, JSON serialization/deserialization, status codes, and other REST features. Click here for more information.

However, it’s still worth waiting for the next WordPress release as there are some key things still left to implement. After full endpoints are integrated, you will be able to use your WordPress database to manage content on your site and configure the front-end in any language or framework.

In the latest release, Term Taxonomy Meta is enhanced as well. It now brings the taxonomy term meta into the core of the system. In general, you are allowed to add custom field content and associate this metadata with a taxonomy object. For more information about the term, meta check WordPress developer blog.

WordPress has also introduced a template file for a single post. Together with an updated WordPress version, you will also find a single post – post name file template included in the hierarchy of a theme. This means that each post on your WordPress website can now have different designs. So feel free to highlight your posts by bringing them eye-catching looks.

WordPress 4.4. comes with fully responsive images. Even though you have been building websites with fully responsive images via CSS, it didn’t work well on high-resolution screens, right?

Well, WordPress has a solution for this now. As responsive images have been put into the core, any image added to your WordPress site will be using srcset attribute that includes all image sizes. Now you can manage the image size and the browser can download a proper size image for the viewport you are using. Along with this feature, the following functions were added:

h1pwp5_get_attachment_image_srcset() – retrieves the value for an image attachment’s srcset attribute.

h1pwp5_calculate_image_srcset() – a helper function to calculate the image sources to include in a srcset attribute.

h1pwp5_get_attachement_image_sizes() – creates a sizes attribute value for an image.

h1pwp5_calculate_image_sizes() – a helper function to create the sizes attribute for an image.

h1pwp5_make_content_images_responsive() – filters img elements in post content to add srcset and sizes attributes.

h1pwp5_image_add_srcset_and_sizes() – add srcset and sizes attributes to an existing img element.

Not only do these functions bring support for image responsiveness, but they save your bandwidth resources and might speed up the whole website.

To get more information about responsive image implementation, go to the official WordPress blog.

Your WordPress content will now be effortlessly shareable. WordPress has expanded the support for oEmbed that goes beyond Youtube and Twitter. Not only can you add content from various sources, but others can easily share yours as well. Anyhow, for this to happen, other websites should support oEmbed, too.

However, you can turn this feature off by simply installing Disable Embeds plugin, and the feature will be turned off.

There’s no surprise that WordPress 4.4. has also been released with a new default theme called Twenty Sixteen. However, it’s not about appearance only. To find out how all of the new features listed in this article work, check the code of Twenty Sixteen.

You can install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and see how the new features work. And if you are ready to upgrade your WordPress into version 4.4., you can download it at the official WordPress site or upgrade your CMS straight at your website admin panel.

Which feature do you find the best? What other integrations are you still waiting for? Share your thoughts below! Also, if you’ve found this article valuable, click to share. Thanks!