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What’s New in WordPress Version 4.6

Named after jazz musician Pepper Adams and led by Dominik Schilling, WordPress version 4.6 has arrived.

Nothing ground-breaking in this particular release: instead, there’s simply a heap of small improvements made to various aspects — some obvious and some very much behind the scenes.

Let’s take a quick look at the main highlights:

More Streamlined Theme and Plugin Updates

Streamlined Updates — a.k.a. ‘Shiny Updates’ — is a brand new feature designed to make the process of installing new themes and plugins from the WordPress.org directory easier and more user-friendly. With WordPress v4.6, instead of being redirected to a new page when choosing a particular action (like installing, updating and deleting a theme or plugin), everything just happens in the background, allowing you to keep your place on the exact same page you’re on. Simple!

Native Fonts In The Backend

The larger a site grows, the more often you hear the complaint that the WordPress backend (i.e. the Admin pages) slows down. WordPress 4.6 makes another step forward in the effort to reduce admin page load times by allowing the system to use fonts you already have on your own computer — thereby negating the time it takes for such pages to load their own fonts. Plus there’s also the added advantage that users will be greeted with a font that’s likely more familiar to them.

Inline Link Checking

If you’ve ever accidentally included a broken link within a post or page (and let’s face it: who hasn’t?!), then you’ll almost certainly appreciate the introduction of automatic inline link checking within the WordPress Visual Editor.

Important note: Inline Link Checking only works when inserting a link using the link-adding button — simply pasting a URL straight into the text means it won’t get checked!

Improved Content Recovery

A relatively subtle — yet potentially very frustration-saving — new feature, WordPress will now check to see whether or not the browser has managed to save any newer content (created by the user) than WordPress itself has already autosaved: and if so, it will autosave this newer version instead.

WordPress’ autosave feature was already pretty darn good, but with WordPress 4.6, it’s now even better!

Plus:

Plus, as usual: a number of under the hood improvements — including ‘Resource Hints’ (helping browsers to decide which resources to fetch and preprocess), ‘Robust Requests’ (improvements to the HTTP API), ‘Translations on Demand’ (allowing WordPress to use the newest language packs for themes and plugins as soon as they’re made available) and further updates to JavaScript libraries.

Note: for a complete list of all that’s new in WordPress v4.6, check out the official version 4.6 codex.

Stay tuned for news and info on WordPress 4.7 (to be led by Helen Hou-Sandi; release scheduled for release in December 2016) — and remember to always, always make a complete backup of your site before updating!

By WinningWP Editorial

Run by Brin Wilson, WinningWP is an award-winning resource for people who use – you guessed it – WordPress. Follow along on Twitter and/or Facebook.
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