Just a quick heads up for those who are WordPress plugin and theme development or anyone who are into testing WordPress beta releases. The dev team just released WordPress 4.4 Beta 4 earlier today and is now available for download.
With less than a month to go before the scheduled release of WordPress 4.4, the dev team is working hard to iron out all the issues and squash all the bugs. They will be needing all the help they can get and that’s what ordinary users like you and me can help – testing the beta releases.
In case you missed the previous announcements or posts about the development of WordPress 4.4, below are some of the changes and new features that will be included in the final release:
- Twenty Sixteen – The newest default theme for WordPress.
- Responsive Images – WordPress automatically delivers a more appropriate image to users depending on a variety of conditions like screen size, viewport size, and screen resolution.
- Embeds – WordPress can now embed rich content from nearly all sites that support the oEmbed standard – not just YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and the like. You can even embed previews of posts from other WordPress sites by pasting the URL on its own line.
Developer-related changes:
- REST API (phase 1) – The underlying infrastructure of the WordPress REST API plugin has been included in WordPress 4.4. Plugin authors can take advantage of this by adding custom endpoints.
- Term Metadata – Taxonomy term metadata is now included in WordPress 4.4. If you’ve already been using a plugin to implement term metadata, you should read this post on how to prepare. Also, the underlying WP_Term class improves caching when working with terms.
- Improved
<title>output – wp_title() is now deprecated; WordPress can handle the rendering of the document title automatically. - Comments – Comment queries are now split for performance. Also, the underlying WP_Comment class improves caching and introduces strong-typing.
If you think that you have discovered a bug, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the official WordPress support forums.
Don’t forget, this release – WordPress 4.4 Beta 4 is a development release and is for testing purposes only. It is not intended to be used on live or production sites. If you need to try it out, make sure you install and test it on a sandbox (test installation).
Any of you guys there trying out WordPress 4.4 Beta 4? Did you experience any issues while testing it or find any bugs? Which new feature/s are you excited about? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
