Well here it is, WordPress 4.6 was released this morning to not much fanfare.
This is the 2nd LTS major release of 2016, and 4.6 brings some quite cool new improvements and fixes quite a few bugs as well.
And to showe you that the Monkey Tribe have not been sitting on their behinds, but have got into it and monkeyed around with this release, we’ll show you what’s new in WordPress 4.6 and which features you should try after updating your websites.
WordPress 4.6 is here, but you need to push the button
First off you should understand that 4.6 is a major WordPress release, and you will have to manually initiate the update. No automatic on this one, so head over to your update page.
Important: As always, don’t forget to create a complete WordPress backup before starting the update. Take this time to do this every time, seriously!
Saying that of course if you are on a well managed WordPress hosting service such as GreenGeeks or GoDaddy, then they will do all this backup and heavy lifting for you.
Native System Fonts in 4.6
Way back in the eons of time (about 2 years ago in WordPress 3.2!) WordPress started using Open Sans from Google Fonts project, as the NORMAL default font so that the administrator back-end interface looks the same on different platforms and devices. However, this meant a tiny compromise on speed (your site had to load this font from Goggle every time) and relying on a 3rd party project.
Since 4.6, WordPress will now use your normal system font for the administrator back-end area, so it’ll look like your desktop etc. This will make WordPress load faster and feel like your native device and platform.
This change only affects administrator back-end interface elements inside WordPress admin area of course, so the look and feel of your beack end buttons and cues. It will not affect any of your content areas like post editor which uses your theme’s editor CSS stylesheet for fonts.
Shiny Updates for WordPress Plugins and Themes
So when you installed any new theme or plugin from the WordPress.org repository before this, it showed you an animated progress screen. This added a whole page load unnecessarily and increased the time we all had to spend on installing plugins and themes, well looking at a spinning disk, more than doing anything…
WordPress 4.6 makes all this faster to install and update your WordPress plugins and themes by doing away with this frivolous and extra page and does so without leaving the page you are on. Sounds minor? All these tweaks make the framework slicker and faster…
Broken Links Highlighting
Sometimes we all add a broken link or badly typed (copy-paste my friends!) URL in a post. If you publish this post, then that mistype link goes live too, and the GOOG don’t like it.
Now in our new shiny 4.6, WordPress will attempt to check for broken or badly formatted links when you are using the standard WordPress Visual Editor. If a link is broken, then it will be highlighted with red dots, showing the link URL in red.
Improved Auto-Save and Recovery
For those of us who work on our sites on the run and on the road, WordPress 4.6 now has a much better disaster recovery mode for the recently introduced auto-save feature in your post editor. Previously, when we set it to disable revisions, it affected restoring drafts from browser cache and autosave feature.
This issue is now fixed and we will be able to easily restore our on-the-go posts from the new system browser backups and autosave. 🙂
Go and Monkey around with your Shiny New WordPress 4.6
We hope this little monkey-ditty gave you a short and simple idea what’s new in WordPress 4.6.
We are most Monkey excited about the broken link highlighting, which allows us to lose one of our normal plugins (which is also a resource hog!).
What are you most pleased about with this new WordPress 4.6 release?