Improvements in WordPress v4.6

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. New features in 4.6 help users focus on the important things while feeling more at home.

Justin Downey

8 years ago

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. New features in 4.6 help users focus on the important things while feeling more at home.

Update Improvement: Updating your plugins and themes has got much better!
Native Fonts: WordPress now uses your native system fonts which would result in slightly faster backend performance.
Content Recovery: Your content is now automatically saved in the browser so you can restore it from browser backups on needs.
Editor Link Checker: The editor will now highlight if you’re adding a broken link.

WordPress 4.6 Video

Here’s a quick video from WordPress showing a few of these nifty improvements in action.

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Under the Hood

There are a few under the hood improvements that improve the core for developers as well. For a detailed list, check out the release post on WordPress.org. Here are a few of the improvements that really jumped out at us.

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. That all adds up to some noticeable performance boosts in the backend.

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. This is continued progress to WordPress becoming a more fully-fledged CMS–much like Drupal.

Customizer APIs for Settings Improvements

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.

Caching and Query Improvements for Multisite

Cached and comprehensive site queries improve your network admin experience when using WordPress in Multisite mode. The addition of WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query help craft advanced queries with less effort.