Here is a great news for you guys. As it was scheduled, WordPress 4.4 is out now on December 8, 2015. We all know that WordPress developers are in love with the Jazz music and this time, WordPress 4.4 is named after the Jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown. You are provided with many good reasons for downloading the latest version of this unrivalled content management system for blogging and website development. Visit WordPress.org and download WordPress 4.4 now. Every WordPress user is champing at the bit to work on the latest release. Now, its time to unveil it’s new features which are going to make publishing and website development more efficient and easier.

Twenty Sixteen Theme:

As it does every year, this last release of the year brings a brand new default theme. WordPress developers worked on this theme with the mobile first approach. Specially designed to be suitable for all devices, it is a modernized theme with traditional blog layout having a horizontal masthead and an optional right sidebar. It has great customizing options which can make this theme acquire the looks of your choice. You can use your own color scheme, add header and background images, menus, and widgets. You may use WordPress website builder or WordPress theme builder to make beautiful theme.

Responsive Images:

WordPress 4.4 supports responsive images. When you upload an image in the media library, WordPress 4.4 automatically crops it in different sizes to make it suitable for displays of different sizes. Uploaded images are cropped to full, large, medium and thumbnail sizes. srcset and sizes attributes are added in this version allowing it to automatically use the right image for different browsers and displays of different devices. More bandwidth and time is required to load large images. However, if you are developing your website using WordPress 4.4, no bandwidth and time will be wasted in loading an image as it is available in the right size for a device.

Embedding Posts:

Being an oEmbed consumer for last 6 years, previous versions of WordPress have been allowing their users to embed videos, tweets, status updates, and other content from oEmbed providers. Till now it was an oEmbed consumer, but from WordPress 4.4 onwards, it is an oEmbed provider also. Therefore, you can easily embed content to and from websites supporting oEmbed. As WordPress 4.4 is now both provider and consumer, you can embed posts from one WordPress 4.4 to another WordPress 4.4. A WordPress post can be embedded in other WordPress post simply by dropping its URL in the editor.

Under The Hood:

The handiest under the hood improvement in WordPress 4.4 is the integration of REST API infrastructure into the WordPress core. Till now, developers have to rely on plugins for this. From now, they can create and extend existing WP REST APIs for applications on the top of the WordPress 4.4. It is the first part of this improvement. The next part of this improvement is the inclusion of core endpoints which we are going to see in the upcoming release.

Another great under hood improvement made in the WordPress 4.4 is related with terms and taxonomies. Just like posts and users, terms in taxonomies are also going to have metadata. Now, there is a new table wp_termmeta in the WordPress. Arbitrary data of terms can be managed using add_term_meta(), update_term_meta(), delete_term_meta(), and get_term_meta().

The introduction of WP_Network class is one of the many useful under the hood improvements made for the multisite network. Handling of multisites and fixation of bugs is easier in WordPress 4.4 as compared to its previous versions.

With the introduction of WP_comment class, comment object and query is improved. Cache handling is introduced to improve the performance of comment queries. Changes are made in comment form which now displays text area first and then ask the visitor to provide name before entering email and website in the corresponding textboxes.

Conclusion:

With this latest version, WordPress is continuing to evolve as the most powerful blogging and website development platform. The default Twenty Sixteen theme is suitable for all devices. Responsive image and embedding of posts are the most attention grabbing features in this version. More improvements are expected in upcoming releases.