Photo by By Ufo Snake under Creative Commons
The latest WordPress 4.4 release is now available. It’s nicknamed “Clifford” after a jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown. Since 4.4 is a major update (ie. not a minor security update), you most likely need to manually run an update on your WordPress sites unless you have a hosting account that handles it for you. If you are not sure how to update your WordPress, refer to this step by step article.
This Short Video Shows You Highlights of WordPress 4.4
Responsive Images
WordPress 4.4 automatically resizes images in your pages and posts to perfectly fit the display of the device used to view the site. Look at your image on your computer, tablet, or phone, and you’ll see the images “respond” to the screen size. This happens behind the scenes for you. WordPress 4.4 dosen’t just shrink or expand the file that you put on the page, but they actually change which file it is serving up to the viewer. So if you upload an image that’s 3mb and 4000px wide, but you’re displaying it on a small screen, it will use one of the different sized images that it created that’s 300kb and 400px side. So with this, the speed of your site loading on mobile devices has greatly improved.
New Default Theme: Twenty Sixteen
WordPress 4.4 ships with the brand-new default theme, Twenty Sixteen. At a glance, it looks like any traditional, simple WordPress default themes, but it was designed with “mobile-first” approach, making it display perfectly on mobile devices as well as large desktop screens. Its custom color options will help your site look unique.
Embedding Posts
When you paste a URL of a post from a site running on WordPress, you’ll see an embed preview right in the editor (sometimes it takes a fewseconds) . This is what happened when I pasted the URL of the WordPress 4.4 announcement blog post at the WordPress.org site: see image below.
Comment Box Before Name and Email
With the old WordPress default setting, we used to see the “Name” and “Email” fields before the actual comment box. With WordPress 4.4, the comment box is shown above the Name and Email fields, which goes with a more natural flow for most people.
Improvements for WordPress 4.4 Developers
WordPress 4.4 also came with lots of improvements to make things easier for WordPress developers. We, as the users, do not see them right in front of us, but we can probably expect more cool features created by WordPress theme and plugin developers in the near future because of this.
Watch a Video Walkthrough of WordPress 4.4
Read about WordPress 4.4 in WordPress.org’s blog post here.
Let me know what you think about these new features in the comment section below!
