The Latest version of WordPress 4.4 has been released recently. WordPress the most popular Content Management System, which powers %25 of the web and allows you to create different type of websites easily.

After four months of intense development led by Scott Taylor, WordPress 4.4 “Clifford”named after jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown, is available for download. WordPress version 4.3 Billie Holiday was released in August 2015.

The latest WordPress release features fully responsive images, WordPress embeds, new Twenty Sixteen default theme, the first half of the REST API, and a host of small improvements.

Twenty Sixteen Theme

Each major WordPress release comes with many new features and every year WordPress release new default Theme. Takashi Irie is a WordPress Theme Developer at Automatic the company behind WordPress CMS. According to WordPress developers Newest default theme, Twenty Sixteen, is a modern take on a classic blog design.

Twenty Sixteen is designed by Takashi Irie, keeping mobile first and responsive approach in mind. The new default Twenty Sixteen theme has an optional right-hand sidebar and displays author information to the left of posts.

You can modify four different color schemes, dark, gray, red, and yellow using the Customizer.

Twenty Sixteen was built to look great on any device. A fluid grid design, flexible header, fun color schemes, and more, will all make your content shine.

Responsive Images

WordPress now takes a smarter approach to display appropriate image sizes on any device, ensuring a perfect fit every time. You don’t need to do anything to your theme, it just works.

Previously, you had to add some CSS To make your images responsive but now When you will upload images to WordPress, it automatically crops them to smaller sizes.

WordPress 4.4 has added srcset and sizes support to WordPress. This allows WordPress to automatically use and display the right image based on a device screen size.

Responsive Images will decrease the amount of bandwidth used to load websites since smaller images have smaller file sizes. Google also supports and highly recommend Responsive Web Design and WordPress supporting Responsive Design with Responsive Themes and Responsive Images.

Embed Everything : Even WordPress Posts

For a number of years, You have been able to embed content from so many websites simply by pasting the URL into the visual editor. WordPress 4.4 now allows you to Embed content from other WordPress powered websites.

You can embed your posts on other WordPress sites very easily. Simply drop a post URL into the editor to see an instant embed preview, complete with the title, excerpt, and featured image if you have set one. WordPress 4.4 will even include your site icon and links for comments and sharing.

Embedded Post will display in an iframe (if you haven’t disable the ability for people to embed your content) with a link to comments, a share icon, and an excerpt of the post. Here you can see a example of oEmbedded post.

https://justlearnwp.com/kind-type-of-websites-you-can-create-with-wordpress/

If you don’t like the enhanced embeds in WordPress 4.4? You can Easily disable the feature using free Disable Embeds plugin created by Pascal Birchler.

In addition to post embeds, WordPress 4.4 also adds support for five new oEmbed providers: Cloudup, Reddit Comments, ReverbNation, Speaker Deck, and VideoPress.

REST API For Developers

If you are a plugin or theme developer, there is something interesting for you as well. As a Plugin and theme developer you can start using the first half of the REST API immediately to replace existing custom admin-ajax endpoints.

To learn more about Rest API you can read REST API: Welcome the Infrastructure to Core by Ryan Mccue.

The REST API gives developers an easy way to build and extend RESTful APIs on top of WordPress. For more information on extending the REST API, check out the official WordPress REST API (Version 2) plugin. WordPress REST API (Version 2) provides an easy to use REST API, available via HTTP.

You can grab your site’s data in simple JSON format, including users, posts, taxonomies and more. Retrieving or updating data is as simple as sending a HTTP request. You can read Plugin Description to learn more about this plugin.

Other WordPress updates include

New WP_Network class for WordPress Multisite
Rebuilt WP_Comments Component : Comment field displays first, followed by the Name, Email, and URL fields.
Terms now support metadata : add_term_meta(), get_term_meta(), and update_term_meta() for more information.
Updates that make interacting with terms, comments, and networks more intuitive
Improvements to comment queries : cache handling to improve performance

Developers

WordPress 4.4 update was led by Scott Taylor and features more than 2,000 commits made by 469 contributors. The next update, WordPress 4.5, will be led by Mike Schroder.

Download WordPress 4.4

You can Download latest version from WordPress Download Page or update in your WordPress dashboard.