WordPress 4.6 “Pepper”
Version 4.6 of WordPress, named “Pepper” in honor of jazz baritone saxophonist Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams III, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. This release adds numerous new features and functions, along with a host of updates.
Some highlights of WordPress 4.6 include:
- Update Improvement – All of your theme and plugin management is handled in a much more streamlined installation and update process.
- Native Fonts – WordPress now uses your native system fonts rather than external resources.
- Editor Backups – Content is automatically saved to the browser as you type in the editor.
- Editor Link Checker – The editor will now check links as they are input into the window.
Streamlined Updates
Ever wish that you could just download, install, update, and delete plugins without constantly reloading pages? Gone are the days of watching a progress screen each time you install a plugin or theme. With WordPress 4.6 you can now install, update and delete plugins or themes without being navigated to new pages. Building on the work introduced in WordPress 4.2, this release makes updating, installing, and deleting plugins and themes even faster.
Native Fonts
The WordPress dashboard now takes advantage of the fonts you already have, making it load faster and letting you feel more at home on whatever device you use.
In addition, the WordPress dashboard will now prioritize fonts that you already have installed. Basically, this means that it will load and run a bit faster, since webfonts will be the fallback. It also means that your typographical experience in WordPress may vary greatly.
Using native fonts not only increases WordPress’ performance, it also gives it a consistent look and feel. Developers are encouraged to note the specific changes to the font-stack and update accordingly.
Editor Improvements
By default, WordPress saves the post title, content, and excerpt in the browser every 15 seconds on the edit post screen and prior to submitting the form. Since content in the browser is newer, WordPress 4.6 will recover it first before resorting to an auto save.
Recover mode improvements have also been made. The biggest change here is that you can now access your recent autosaves even if you have the revisions disabled (so now when your cat decides to walk across your keyboard you can actually undo their changes – thank goodness!).
Broken link detection is now built right into the main editor. This way if and when you try to add a broken link you’ll be alerted to your error so you can fix it. This is better for you since broken links are no good for SEO, and better for the folks that you’re trying to link to.
URL Syntax
WordPress 4.6 will automatically detect if a link contains the correct syntax. If a link is malformed, a red dotted outline is displayed. It’s important to note that the URL checker only works if you insert links via the button as pasting a URL onto text bypasses the check.
Conclusion
All in all, this update is made up of quality-of-life features for both content editors, site managers, and theme developers. Of course there were a handful of other changes like JavaScript library updates, Customizer APIs for validation constraints, improvements to multisite, a Meta Registration API expansion and more.
To get a full defination of it, just update !
