With the release of the new WordPress version, we are seeing several improvements, and some new features rolling out. Let’s see what they are in more detail
Shiny updatess for plugins and themes updates
A big improvement comes when you’re upgrading your plugins or themes. The plugin and theme installation and upgrade will be done without refreshing the page, which is a nice addition.
Post Editor improvements
WordPress uses TinyMCE editor for writing posts. Besides existing ability to add inline links by just pasting them on the selected text, developers added a coll feature which will automatically check if your link is broken or misspelled. Such links will be highlighted in red.
Removed Google Fonts in admin interface
One of the more noticeable changes will surely be removal of Open Sans font provided by Google Fonts. Core developers and designers agreed that the overall uniformity of the WordPress admin interface isn’t that important, and that it’s better to rely on the system’s own native fonts. The differences are minor, and the gain is – to be quite honest, not that noticeable. The good thing is that WordPress won’t rely on third party project to provide fonts, and there will be some performance gain, but the overall performance gain is minor.
Autosave and recovery improvements
There was an issue with restoring posts if the revisions were disabled in the earlier versions. This has been fixed, and users will be able to restore posts from backups and autosave.
Locale and translation improvements
The translations that are hosted by WordPress.org community will now take precedence over the translations in the plugin. Also jQuery UI datepicker is displayed with proper locale.
For developers
There are some improvements that will concern the developers.
Support for DNS Prefetching & Prerender
Improvement has been made in the resource prefetching which will improve performance.
Meta registration
The new register_meta() function has been added for registration of meta keyes. It works simmilarly to register_post_type(), and allows for a better metadata handling.
WP_Post_Type Class
There is a new WP_Post_Type class added in version 4.6. It changes $wp_post_types to an array of WP_Post_Type objects, which gives us methods to handle post type supports, meta boxes, hooks etc.
WP_Term_Query Class
The new WP_Term_Query class in WordPress 4.6 provides a better structure for generating term queries.
These are some of the biggest changes to the new WordPress version. There are much more being done under the hood, bugs and issues solved with each version. If you’d like to contribute to core WordPress improvements be sure to check out Make WordPress Core page.
Image taken from wordpress.org