New in WordPress 4.6 – Video Tour

Take a quick video tour of all the new features and changes in WordPress 4.6. There are only a few that you can see, but many more under the hood that you need to know about.

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Video Tour Notes

One of the first things you may notice is a change to your fonts on your admin pages. WordPress adopted the Open Sans Google font back in version 4.2. But doing so requires uploading them from Google every time you log into your site. That’s a performance issue, and relies too much on a 3rd party vendor.

So now the fonts you see are native to your computer’s operating system and the browser you’re using. I’m on PC, using Windows 10 and the FireFox browser for this tutorial. So, how your fonts appear may be different than what you see here.

Another change in 4.6 that you’ll see is to the updates admin page. They included the Shiny Updates plugin into the core. Now you can do the updates directly from the plugins page.

Another visible change is to the inline link checker. It will attempt to check if the link is broken or not well formatted. This is a change I’ll be keeping my eye on for performance concerns. I entered several bogus links to various sites and couldn’t get it to show as broken, so not sure how much I would rely on this new feature just yet.

Now, this Content Recovery change is something I’m definitely going to be testing. In a previous release of WordPress, they turned up the frequency, or heartbeat, of how often WordPress saves a revision. That became a resource hog in a couple of ways. I’ll see if more saves to your browser has the same effect and let you know.

Another visible change you’ll really appreciate is the ability to click and drag an embedded media preview around.

I’m going to jump over to a test page so you can see.

I’ve embedded one of my Facebook Live streams.

Now we can click and drag this embedded media preview around and place it just as we do with a regular image.

Another visible change that I don’t have an example of to show you is cropping on thumbnails. By default, WordPress makes several size versions of every image you upload. The thumbnails should be cropped from the size closest to their defined size, but it doesn’t always work out well. WordPress 4.6 changes how they search for a suitable alternative size to use before relying on the smallest available.

Those are most all of the visible changes that you can see in WordPress 4.6.

There were LOTS of developer level changes in WordPress 4.6, many of which you can’t see, but may affect your plugins.

You’ll want to read my post on What’s Under the Hood of WordPress 4.6 for more details that are in non-geek speak, but tell you enough that you understand what to watch out for.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick video tour of what’s new in WordPress 4.6.