What’s new in WordPress 4.6

[lead]The latest WordPress 4.6 release comes with lots of small improvements. Some a bit more obvious than others. What can you expect from WordPress 4.6? Let’s dig in.[/lead]

More streamlined theme and plugin updates

The streamlined updates are a new feature which makes the process of updating, installing and deleting themes and plugins easier and more user-friendly. Instead of being redirected to a new page everything just happens in the background.

Native fonts in the back-end

Instead of the external Open Sans font that WordPress had been using for the admin area, WordPress 4.6 will now use native system fonts. Natives fonts are fonts already installed on your system. This means that the back-end may now vary slightly across different systems.

Why the switch you would ask?
WordPress gives two reasons for this.

First. It gives a slight performance improvement for the back-end.
Second. It’s just no longer necessary according to the WordPress developers.

Open Sans is no longer necessary. Originally introduced it into Core via MP6 because there were not good system fonts common to all platforms at the time. In the years since, Windows, Android, OS X, iOS, Firefox OS, and various flavors of Linux have all gotten their own (good) system UI fonts.

Inline Link Checking

The post editor makes it easier to detect when you’re linking to a broken URL so you can fix it straight away.

How WordPress will check whether or not a link is broken?

It will automatically send an HTTP request to the link. If the link responds as 403/404, WordPress will flag it as a bad link and highlight it in red.

Improved content recovery

By default, WordPress 4.6 saves the post title, content, and excerpt in the browser every 15 seconds when editing post or pages. Since content in the browser is newer, WordPress 4.6 will recover it first before resorting to an auto save.

Under The Hood

Resource Hints – Resource hints help browsers decide which resources to fetch and pre-process. 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.