WordPress 4.4: New Release

So far in 2015, there have been 3 major releases of WordPress: 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3. 4.4 is now ready and has just been released

It goes without saying that you should always use the latest version of WordPress. It will make your website faster, better and more secure.

Technology is moving fast, and WordPress is sprinting to stay ahead of the game, bringing out features and capabilities that will enable it to thrive in the vast web ecosystem.

So here are the main new features of WordPress 4.4:

WordPress REST API (Phase 1)
WPBeginner.com says: “Finally, the underlying infrastructure for WordPress REST API plugin is added into core with WordPress 4.4. REST API allows WordPress developers to create new APIs or work on the existing WordPress APIs in their own applications.”

It’s becoming more important than ever that applications can talk to each other as simply and seamlessly as possible. Opening up these vital lines of light-weight communication through REST API increases performance, efficiency and scalability.

WordPress’ full adoption of REST is something likely to be emulated by an increasing number of companies in the future “as enterprises seek to provide open and well-defined interfaces for application and infrastructure services” and as public and cloud computing continues to grow (TechTarget).

Taxonomy Term Meta Data

Metadata is vital: as John James Jacoby writes, “Without term-meta, it’s impossible to describe a tag or category beyond it’s literal description. Terms are crippled without metadata, and are infinitely powerful with it.”

For ages now, WordPress has allowed for meta on objects like posts, comments and users. This new version of WordPress brings taxonomy term meta data into the core, so that categories, tags or any custom taxonomy can now get meta data associated with them.(#14162)

This is significant because, as Jeff Chandler explains, “Not only does it create more opportunities to extend WordPress, but [it] does so in a standard and expected way. Previous to WordPress 4.4, developers had to rely on work-arounds to add term meta to taxonomies.”

Comment Queries

Comments are an important aspect of any WordPress website. The new release has made significant improvements to the comments system, introducing “term meta, a new WP_Term class, and a host of other under the hood changes” (WordPress.org). Comment queries are split for a better, faster and more powerful performance (#8071, #32619).

In WordPress 4.4, comments land on both the front and backend of websites: “On the front-end, the comment field will always appear first, before the name and email fields. This fixes a longstanding bug where the behavior was different for logged in and logged out users.”

Responsive Images Out of The Box

Today, more people access the web via a mobile device than via computer, so having mobile-responsive websites is a must. Which is why WordPress 4.4’s new ability to show Responsive Images out of the box is so useful.

It works for all images added to posts, featured images, attachment pages and image galleries, automatically creating different versions of each image and uploading them to the media library. Using srcset attribute, the end user’s browsers then determine the most-appropriate image based on the device’s capabilities, saving bandwidth and speeding up the page download time.

Plus, because the srcset is ‘added on the fly’, all images that have been previously added will also benefit from this feature.

Better Embeds

Having decent embeds is vital for keeping end-users engaged and on-site. With the new WordPress 4.4, any user can automatically embed rich media content- Youtube videos, Tweets, Facebook pages and even WordPress blogs- simply by entering the URL into a post.

All updated WordPress websites will support oEmbed, and can embed from any other site that uses oEmbed.

WordPress’s new annual theme: Twenty Sixteen.

This default theme ‘focuses on readability and elegant display on all devices’. Here’s a preview:

Its designer, Takashi Irie, describes Twenty Sixteen as “a modernised approach of an ever-popular layout — a horizontal masthead and an optional right sidebar that works well with both blogs and websites. It has custom color options that allow you to make your own Twenty Sixteen. The theme was designed on a harmonious fluid grid with a mobile first approach. This means it looks great on any device.”

So there we have it: the main new features of WordPress 4.4. Download it now, and you’ll have them all.

At UpdraftPlus, we’ve run extensive tests on WordPress 4.4 and found that everything works fine. Remember, users of UpdraftPlus Premium will benefit from an automatic backup before the new WordPress update!