Monthly Archives: December 2015

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Meetup notes from “What’s New in WordPress 4.4?” for December 2015

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This month we talked about what’s new in the latest release of WordPress, version 4.4. Here’s a few notes from the evening’s presentation.

Little History

First a little history and reminder. With WordPress releases like 3.x and 4.x –  these are generally bigger updates to WordPress that include new features or large changes.

3.4.1 or 4.3.2 are smaller bug and security fixes – these are applied automatically by default. You won’t often find much outward facing in these updates.

Last Few Releases

Here’s a list of the last few releases of WordPress leading up to 4.4 and what they brought to the table.

4.2 – Bud Powell

  • Customizer came into its own
  • new languages!
  • better plugin installations
  • “Press This” got an update (bookmarklet that allows you to quickly post content from wherever you’re at on the web.)
  • emoji support (really a sneaky update for better Unicode support) for translations

4.3 – Billie Holiday

  • resetting password made more secure
  • menus added to Customizer
  • multisite changes
  • updated editor – switching between visual and text with less “ugh”
  • formatting shortcuts in visual editor
    • * or 1.

4.4 – Clifford Brown

That brings us to our most recent release. One little note, Eric Juden and Joe McGill are two local st. Louisan’s who are code contributors in this release!

  • New Default Theme – Twenty Sixteen
  • Responsive Images
    • supplies the relevant sizes to the browser
    • visitors only get the best image size
    • Built into core so themes and plugins can take advantage (like Twenty Sixteen)
    • Joe McGill!
  • oEmbed for WordPress
    • like embedding a YouTube or tweet, you can now embed WP posts from other WP sites
    • Added new services like Cloudup, Reddit Comments, ReverbNation, Speaker Deck, and VideoPress.
  • Taxonomists – terms now have metadata, just like posts and users
  • Rest API – you can speak to other websites and services using JSON.
    • Create you own endpoints to communicate with WordPress
    • Community member Paul Heirendt had a great video to share explaining APIs!
      • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvQJcBBsi3k
  • Other – few multisite fixes, language updates

Read More

http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_4.4

https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/wordpress-4-4/

See you in January!

Thank you to everyone who came out. Our next general meetup is January 20th. I hope to see you there!