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!