What New Features are in WordPress 4.6?

New Features of WordPress 4.6

WordPress 4.6, the next major version of WordPress, is in full-swing development mode and the core development team, led by Dominik Schilling, have set the target release for August 16, 2016. Just yesterday, the final planned beta version of WordPress 4.6, WordPress 4.6 Beta 4 was released and the final release candidate will be released soon. In this article, we’ve highlighted the new features of WordPress 4.6.

You can try the beta version using WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”) or you can download the beta here (zip).

Since this is the beta version, no more new features will be added until the final release of WordPress 4.6. And some of the existing features in beta may not make it into the final release. We’ll only know that after the final version has been made public.

Some New Features of WordPress 4.6 to Look Forward to:
Shiny Updates

WordPress 4.6 will bring shiny updates. When a user installed a new theme or plugin, or update one, they usually saw a progress screen. The progress screen was nothing more than one more page to load. With Shiny updates, users can now install and update themes and plugins without being redirected to the progress screen.

Shiny Updates
Shiny Updates
Native System Fonts in WordPress Admin Area

WordPress started using Open Sans font in WordPress admin area to offer uniformity in the look across different devices and platforms. However, this required WordPress to depend on an external third party source, resulting in longer load time of admin area and slower processing.

In WordPress 4.6, the admin area will revert back to using the system fonts. This means that the WordPress admin panel may look different depending on the platform being used.

To keep your custom admin pages looking consistent with the rest of the WordPress admin, you are encouraged to audit your CSS. The new font stack is:

[p] font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, “Segoe UI”, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, “Helvetica Neue”, sans-serif; [/p]

When using this font stack, it must be called using the font- family property, and not the ont shorthand. This works around an issue in Microsoft Edge. Additionally, the only font weights used in core now are 400 for general text and 600 for heavier text.

Native System Fonts in Admin Area
Native System Fonts in Admin Area

These are the system fonts that will be used in WordPress admin area on different platforms and environments.

  • apple-system for Safari and Firefox on macOS and iOS
  • Helvetica Neue on macOS prior to 10.11
  • BlinkMacSystemFont for Google Chrome on macOS
  • Segoe UI for Windows
  • Roboto for Android and Chrome OS
  • Oxygen-Sans for KDE
  • Ubuntu for Ubuntu
  • Cantarell for GNOME
  • sans-serif, the standard fallback

A great addition to the list of new features of WordPress 4.6.

Note: This change will only affect the UI elements of WordPress admin area.

Editor Improvements in 4.6

WordPress 4.6 also aims to improving post editing experience. 4.6 will bring improvements to the autosave feature in WordPress. Before, when users disable revisions, it also affected restoring posts from autosave feature. With WordPress 4.6, users can restore WordPress posts from browser backups and autosave even when the revisions have been disable.

Besides that issues, if you’re using the visual editor for writing posts, any broken link entered will be highlighted.

If you add a link, WordPress will immediately examine the link. If you take your mouse cursor to the linked text, you’ll see the link in red color, if the link is bad. It will be the usual blue, if valid.

WordPress 4.6 highlights bad links
WordPress 4.6 highlights bad links
Under the Hood Improvements

WordPress 4.6 will also bring some exciting new improvements to the WordPress core but are mainly for the developers.

Standardized Metadata Registration

WordPress 4.6 will bring register_meta() function for the registration of meta keys. This function works similar to register_post_type() function. It will allow plugins and theme developers to use a standardized way to work with meta data stored with posts, users, comment, or terms object types. (#35658)

New WP_Post_Type Class

WordPress 4.6 will introduce the new WP_Post_Type class. It changes $wp_post_types to an array of WP_Post_Type objects. This provides methods to handle post type supports, rewrite rules, meta boxes, hooks, and taxonomies. (#36217)

New WP_Term_Query Class

Similar to WP_Query, WP_User_Query, and WP_Comment_Query classes, WP_Term_Query in WordPress 4.6 will provide a better structure for generating term queries. (#35381)

WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query Classes

For WordPress multisite networks, the new WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query classes allow querying sites and networks with lazy loading. (#35791, #32504)

We hope this article gives you a gist of what WordPress 4.6 has in store for WordPressers all over the world. What new features of WordPress 4.6 are you excited about?

Source and Image Credit: WPBeginner

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