Like many who have a WordPress site, you have seen the update notice for WordPress 4.4. Also, you probably have thought early adoption bites in the butt, so you are holding off for the intrepid trendsetters to clear the way before you get with the programme.
Anyways, you are right about early adoption, but unlike most of the releases before WordPress 4.4 (which WordPress is calling Clifford after the jazz musician, Clifford Brown), there are at least four reasons Clifford is worth getting excited over.
Here:
1: You can now embed WordPress posts in WordPress posts
With the oEmbed provision in WordPress 4.4, you can embed posts from WordPress sites into any other website that consume oEmbed.
Embedding (which can you can do by dropping the URL into the text editor) renders WordPress posts with excerpts and featured image depending on your preferences. The biggest advantage is that your content is more easily shareable.
2: More embeddable content
In addition to existing embeddable content (including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts) Clifford adds support for more oEmbed providers; Cloudup, Reddit Comments, ReverbNation, Speaker Deck, and VideoPress.
3: Responsive Images
You know how sometimes post images render finely on web and come out of sorts on mobile. Clifford takes care of that. Images always fit. It adds srcset and sizes support to WordPress allowing the it to automatically use and display the right image based on a device’s screen size.
4: The REST API
There has been a lot of buzz around the REST API even before Clifford launched. This is a bonus for me however, because a chunk of it is Greek to me.
For WP developers however, it’s something to get excited about. “This may be the biggest step toward making WordPress a true application framework,” according to Daniel Pataki at wpmudev.com.
The REST API, Daniel said, will allow developers completely de-couple the front-end from the core WordPress package leading to better mobile apps, highly customized themes and – hopefully – clever implementations we haven’t even thought of yet.
Excited? Download the new release here.
Photo Credit: Eric M Martin via Compfight cc
