For all those of you who keep a close watch on the latest development taking place in the world of WordPress. I am sure you all know that release of WordPress 4.3. It was introduced in August this year and soon we are expecting to see another updated version that is 4.4.
Yes, you heard it right, in the second week of December WordPress 4.4 will be released and it is anticipated that there will be some really cool features that it will come endowed with promising to enhance the overall user-experience.
Want to know what all are the features that you can expect in the upcoming version of WordPress and how these will improve the overall experience of how users work with WordPress? Sit back and scroll down to know about these unique features in WordPress 4.4. But before that we suggest you to sneak a peek at the 18 Best Free E-commerce WordPress Themes that we listed some days back.
1. Responsive Images
In WordPress 4.4, the images that users will upload will automatically be cropped in different sizes and the user’s browsers will serve an appropriate size. This means that WordPress 4.4 will support for responsive images to serve appropriate image sizes by default to all users. WordPress will now load an appropriate image based on the user’s device and screen size by adding native screen and sizes supported to WordPress.
2. Externally Embeddable
There will be all new Embed feature in WordPress 4.4. With its latest version that is 4.4, WordPress will be oEmbed provider that it is trying for quite sometime. It will enable any oEmbed consumer to embed posts from WordPress sites. This feature will allow users to easily embed content like videos and tweets from YouTube and Twitter by just pasting its URL in a single line.
3. Twenty Sixteen Default WordPress Theme
Twenty Sixteen will be the default WordPress theme starting WordPress 4.4. If you all know the theme is already available to download from both WordPress themes directory and Github. Custom color options and the default color schemes, multiple menu positions and a social menu, full width layout for Posts, mobile-first approach, custom background and header options are some of the wonderful features of Twenty Sixteen Default.
4. Heading Hierarchy
Headings on the admin screens will be more semantic which will help users of assistive technologies like screen readers.
Besides the above listed features that are for the users, there are few of them that WordPress 4.4 comes endowed with that are best from the developers’ perspective. Below are the developer focused changes of WordPress 4.4.
- REST API which is a JSON-based will be the part of the WordPress 4.4 core. It has two parts that are infrastructure and endpoints. The infrastructure part is available as part of WordPress 4.4 core and the endpoints are still made available only with a plugin.
- WordPress 4.4 includes metadata for Taxonomy terms.
- WordPress 4.4 has replaced the wp_title() with an improved way to generate titles.
- There will be improved comments performance
To sum up, WordPress 4.4 is going to be a next major release of WordPress and it is expected to improve the user-experience with its above listed features that we believe are worthy.