WordPress 4.3 — named “Billie” after jazz great Billie Holiday — was released August 18 — so it seems that our friends at WordPress are giving us an early gift with the expected release of WordPress 4.4 on December 8. WordPress has already released four beta versions for testing and feedback, and progress is going well.
Before we get into the details of the release, here are some links for you to check out the features, download the beta releases, and observe progress:
Version 4.4 Project Schedule
WordPress Release Notifications
Comprehensive List of all WordPress 4.4 Updates
Alpha/Beta Forum for Bug Reports
WordPress 4.4 Beta 4 – (not recommended for production)
Submit Bug Tickets for Review
WordPress Beta Tester Plugin — download and install the latest WordPress beta releases or even the bleeding edge nightlies.
WORDPRESS 4.4: WHAT’S GOING AWAY?
This first one is huge! WordPress wants to do away with the wp_title function for rendering the title tag in your html. The code typically looked like this:
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<title><?php wp_title( ‘|’, true, ‘right’ ); ?></title>
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I’m not sure of too many themes out there that do not have this code utilized, so the team has walked back deprecating the function to avoid breaking millions of sites and tens of thousands of active themes.
WordPress 4.1 introduced a new, recommended means of displaying titles in themes. If you’d like to implement it, remove the reference and, instead, add this backward compatible code to functions.php:
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<?php
if ( ! function_exists( ‘_wp_render_title_tag’ ) ) {
function theme_slug_render_title() {
?>
<title><?php wp_title( ‘|’, true, ‘right’ ); ?></title>
<?php
}
add_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘theme_slug_render_title’ );
}
?>
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Better to clean up your themes now rather than later, when WP devs do decide to deprecate this function altogether!
New themes can add support just by adding the following code to functions.php:
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add_theme_support( ‘title-tag’ );
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So …. it’s not going away just yet, but something to keep an eye on in the future.
WORDPRESS 4.4: WHAT’S CHANGED?
We’ve talked about what’s going away. So what’s changing in version 4.4? Quite a bit, starting with a number of changes related to the REST API.