WordPress 4.4 Clifford is finally out! WordPress is one of the most popular platform for creating websites or starting up a blog. It helps users daily in recreation non-profits posts and in professional profitable ones too. With the latest WordPress 4.4 update called Clifford, you now have the option to do a lot more with your page and add an extra element of oomph to your website or blog. It has 471 contributors making over 2000 commits, the highest number of contributors involved than in any other update!

WordPress 4.4 Clifford!

Here at Smacksmog.com not only are we up to date with what is happening in the WordPress community, but we are also on top of WordPress Developments. It is something we keep a check on as we take content marketing, web development and managing our clients’ requests on WordPress with utmost sincerity. So what is so wonderful about Clifford? We have organized a list to help you answer that.

1.  Better and Responsive Images

WordPress 4.4 Clifford has greatly enhanced its image support by allowing the ‘srcset tag’ that gives you the option to choose which image size and resolution you want to download or put up. It automatically detects the viewer’s screen size, selects and displays the best image size for that screen. Not only will this make your page load faster, be more responsive, but it will also save up on the bandwidth used.

2. Embed Posts from WordPress Sites

While previously WordPress allowed users to create links from other sources into their WordPress pages, they can now create links from WordPress’s own sites. This is great for internet marketing as you can link reviews, posts and details from several sources, including WordPress blogs to your product or content’s page. This will greatly improve networking.

However, for those not in favor of this, a plugin called ‘Disable Embedding’ has been included. You may install it and prevent others from embedding your site and you from embedding other non-whitelisted sites. This change in WordPress 4.4 Clifford is a great step forward of SEO and WordPress. It should help cut down some bad linking and embedding practices commonly found on the internet.

3. The Twenty Sixteen Theme

This brilliant theme has been designed by Takashie Irie to make blogging and reading incredibly easy. The best part is that it is compatible with all screens; be it your phone or tab or laptop! It also provides a fluid outlook, giving a modern twist to the typical blog look. There are four colors available to choose from in this theme; gray, red, dark and yellow

4. Including API Infrastructure into the core

The new REST API Infrastructure has been embedded into the core of WordPress 4.4 Clifford. This further increases the extensibility of WordPress, making it easy for developers to develop and extend the RESTFul APIs on top of WordPress.

However, this is just the first phase of REST API in which routing, handling, infrastructure handling, status codes, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) serialization and deserialization, and others are included. Keep in mind that you will still need the REST API plugin for the end points.

5. Keeping Comments First

The comments box has been placed before all the detail part like, your email, name and website. Though this might seem like a minor change, I find it to help greatly in navigating and leaving comments.

6. Headings Hierarchy in Admin View

In the previous versions the heading was an h2 style which has been converted to h1 level. It helps make your hearing prominent, thereby helping readers understand what your article is about and find relevant information.

7. Multiple Networks

The multisite has a multiple network option added which allows users 4 new functions like add network option, update network option, get network option and delete network option.

8. Accepting email

While the AP Style puts up quite a fight to keep spelling email the right way; with a hyphen, e-mail, it has finally dropped its arms and accepted the more popular way of spelling ’email’. It is only because of this resilience that I find the change noteworthy!

9. Not Deprecated

While there were speculation and rumors that the WP_Title function will be removed, it stays included. The function ‘add_theme_support (‘title tag’) still remains the recommended function to insert title tags. The other one thought to be deprecated was my-hacks.php however it too is still there.

10. Minor Changes

Term Meta allows terms to support metadata just like it is supported on posts, users or comments. They have also added attractive perm links to the unattached attachments. Comment queries have been made more responsive with cache handling, and introduction of new objects has made international with terms, comments and networks more predictable.

Each of these updates is quite noteworthy, and works endlessly towards making your pages on WordPress more efficient, fast and responsive. There will be new updates following this one, but for now I guess all WordPress users are more than happy, at least we at Smacksmog are, as it greatly helps us in our web development and content and internet marketing. In case you are a visual learner, here is a link to a video that describes the changes in Clifford WordPress 4.4. And in case you come across any error or malfunctioning, you may report it on the various WordPress support forums and the WordPress committee is sure to sort it out. If you are really into WordPress you should be sure to read  WordPress Planet for all the news and happenings! Happy WordPress-in until the next update!

If you find your WordPress site needing some tender loving care contact us today and we’ll lend a hand!