The August release of WordPress 4.6 “Pepper” came with several changes, some of which are nearly unnoticeable without specific searching, but still contribute to the smooth flow of the developer. Here’s what we do know:
- Plugins and themes are now streamlined- The loading page that was displayed during installation or updating a plugin or theme has been removed, one less page to load. Thank you, AJAX.
- Native system fonts- originally standardized with Open Sans, WordPress now utilizes native system fonts. This gives a small performance boost, as fonts do not have to be loaded in from Google anymore.
- Link Checks- when adding a link into the editor, WordPress will automatically detect if the link is broken (only functional with the link button, pasting a direct URL is not checked).
- Restoration- even if revisions are disabled, autosaves function locally and a user can restore posts with browser backups.
- Emojis- All Unicode version 9.0 emojis have been incorporated for use within WordPress.
- Internationalization- translation files for plugins and themes are automatically scanned and loaded when a unknown text domain is first hit.
- Resource hints- a new W3C specification that allows “dns-prefetch, preconnect, prefetch, and prerender rleationships of the HTML Link Element (<link>)”. From W3C Editor’s Draft.
Detailed information pertaining to developer improvements and back-end changes can be found in the WordPress Codex.
