WordPress 4.6 arrives with streamlined updates, native fonts, and editor improvements

WordPress.org today launched WordPress 4.6, which adds a slew of new features to the blog management tool to help you “focus on the important things while feeling more at home.” You can download the new release, available in 52 languages, now from WordPress.org/Download (8.2MB).

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that powers 25 percent of the web. The latest version is dubbed “Pepper,” in honor of jazz baritone saxophonist Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams.

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WordPress 4.6 brings streamlined updates. When you update, install, and delete your plugins and themes, you won’t be forced to navigate away from the page.

Next up, the WordPress dashboard can now finally take advantage of the fonts you already have. This should result in faster loading, as well as a more native feel on whatever device you’re using.

There are also two improvements to the editor. The Inline Link Checker automatically checks to make sure your links are correct, and Content Recovery saves your content to the browser as you type.

I’m particularly excited about the latter as many of our team members prefer to write in the browser. Yes, I did write this article about WordPress in Microsoft Word.

Last, but not least, there are a number of under-the-hood improvements:

• Resource Hints: Resource hints help browsers decide which resources to fetch and preprocess. WordPress 4.6 adds them automatically for your styles and scripts making your site even faster.
• Robust Requests: The HTTP API now leverages the Requests library, improving HTTP standard support and adding case-insensitive headers, parallel HTTP requests, and support for Internationalized Domain Names.
• WP_Term_Query and WP_Post_Type: A new WP_Term_Query class adds flexibility to query term information while a new WP_Post_Type object makes interacting with post types more predictable.
• Meta Registration API: The Meta Registration API has been expanded to support types, descriptions, and REST API visibility.
• Translations On Demand: WordPress will install and use the newest language packs for your plugins and themes as soon as they’re available from WordPress.org’s community of translators.
• JavaScript Library Updates: Masonry 3.3.2, imagesLoaded 3.2.0, MediaElement.js 2.22.0, TinyMCE 4.4.1, and Backbone.js 1.3.3 are bundled.
• Customizer APIs for Setting Validation and Notifications: Settings now have an API for enforcing validation constraints. Likewise, customizer controls now support notifications, which are used to display validation errors instead of failing silently.
• Multisite, now faster than ever: Cached and comprehensive site queries improve your network admin experience. The addition of WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query help craft advanced queries with less effort.

WordPress 4.7 is already in the works, though the company didn’t specify a month for its release. That said, we would estimate it probably won’t be out before November.

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