What’s New in WordPress 4.4

WordPress 4.4 “Clifford” (named after jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown) is now available for download. It comes with some cool features like responsive images, WordPress posts embed option, the first half of the REST API and a new default theme – Twenty Sixteen. You can update to WordPress 4.4 from the updates menu of your dashboard.

Twenty Sixteen Theme

WordPress 4.4 introduces a new default theme, Twenty Sixteen, which was designed to look good on any device. Twenty Sixteen comes with a sleek and modern architecture that suits perfectly with a classic blog. It’s fluid, responsive, mobile first approach and four different color schemes can really make your content shine.

Responsive Images

WordPress now automatically crops an uploaded image to smaller sizes and display the appropriate size based on the device. This ensures a perfect fit of the image every time it renders from a different device (regardless of your theme).

In order to take this smarter approach WordPress added two new HTML attributes to the core – srcset and sizes.

WordPress Posts Embed

You can now embed posts from other WordPress sites by simply pasting the post URL into the editor. In addition to posts embed, WordPess 4.4 added support more more oEmbed providers: VideoPress, Reddit Comments, Cloudup, Speaker Deck and ReverbNation.

REST API Infrastructure

In WordPress 4.4, the infrastructure for the REST API has been added. It gives developers an easy way to build and extend RESTful APIs on top of WordPress.

Term Meta Improvements

Terms now support metadata like posts. For more information see add_term_meta(), get_term_meta() and update_term_meta().

Comment Query Improvements

Comment queries now have cache handling to improve performance. New arguments in “WP_Comment_Query” make crafting robust comment queries simpler.

New Term, Comment, and Network Objects

New “WP_Term”, “WP_Comment” and “WP_Network” objects make interacting with terms, comments, and networks more predictable and intuitive in code.