WordPress 4.6 ​“Pepper” released

WordPress 4.6 is out. Go get it. Okay, if I don’t write more than that, I’ll be asked to elaborate, I suspect. And it’s just as well, because this might be one of WordPress’ most important updates in a while. I’m not at all exaggerating about that. You can find out more at the end of the… kidding. Here it is:

WordPress will now save your content to the browser

In my experience, WordPress’ versioning and recovery options have been iffy at best. There have been times that I’ve gone through the process of restoring a draft, only to see the content field completely stripped of content. Don’t get me started on how much of a pain it is to grab content straight from the ​“compare drafts” screen. It’s almost easier to rewrite it all. Well from now on, WordPress will save the current draft to the browser. If everything crashes somewhere between the 6^th and 8^th circles of Hell, content recovery just got a lot easier. No word on fixing the version system though.

Streamlined update process

Ever wish that you could just download, install, update, and delete plugins without constantly reloading pages? Well someone with programming skills did too, and now we have that feature. It just got that much easier to install a plugin that breaks your system. All hail AJAX. (No but really, that’s cool, and will save a lot of people a lot of time.)

Other improvements

There is now an automatic link checker that makes sure you never, ever make a link to https://​wordpress​.org/​e​x​a​m​p​l​e.org ever again. This is possibly as much for your convenience as their bandwidth. In addition, the WordPress dashboard will now prioritize fonts that you already have installed. Basically, this means that it will load and run a bit faster, since webfonts will be the fallback. It also means that your typographical experience in WordPress may vary greatly. Under the hood, they’ve made various improvements, including a few designed to further speed things up. It will also automatically download and use language packs for all of your plugins and themes, provided they are available from WordPress’ translator community. All in all, this update is made up of quality-of-life features for both content editors, site managers, and theme developers. Over the last few updates, we’ve seen a trend of features that deliberately target pet peeves and performance issues, and I like it. I think we can save any attempts to redefine the blogging experience ​’til, say, 6.0?