Last week, WordPress 4.6 beta 2 was released. The full update won’t be released until August 16. Until then, you can set up a test site, download the beta and start playing around.
The team is looking for any and all feedback before the release, so make sure you look around and test everything. For those who don’t want to download the beta, there is a lot to be excited about.
Here are some of our favorite features in 4.6.
Shiny Updates
Shiny Updates are incredibly exciting as they make updating and downloading much easier. When you want to update, simply hit the button and you’re done. It gets rid of the page redirect and pop-ups. Everything is simpler and more straight-forward.
Native Fonts In Admin
In 3.8, the native font was changed to Open Sans. This wasn’t everyone’s favorite option for many reasons including that it has to be loaded from Google Fonts. As WordPress was updated, the need for Open Sans went away. Because of that the font will be changed in 4.6
Improvements To Editor
The editor itself got a refresh with an improved disaster recovery mode. Currently, the save process rarely detects when a save has failed, leading to lost information. The update shows a “There is a newer autosave” message so you’re sure you’re editing the correct post.
4.6 will also recognize when URLs have been broken as you’re typing them.
Don’t worry there are also a lot of updates for the devs.
HTTP Requests
There is now a new library for PHP library for HTML requests. It can support parallel requests whereas you can only make one at a time.
This patch will save time.
Pre-instantiated Widgets Registration
As of 2.8, the process fo widgets wasn’t simple. According to the announcement, “Since WP_Widget was introduced in 2.8 the register_widget() and unregister_widget() functions required the class name (string) of a WP_Widget subclass to be supplied.”
That process is changed in 4.6. As the announcement says:
- Widgets can now be instantiated and registered with constructor dependency injection.
- New widget types can now be added dynamically, such as adding a Recent Posts widget for each post type, per #35990.
Customizer APIs
One of the newest additions is Customizer APIs that are for setting validation and notifications. According to the announcement.
- All modified settings are validated up-front before any of them are saved.
- If any setting is invalid, the Customizer save request is rejected: a save thus becomes transactional with all the settings left dirty to try saving again. (The Customizer transactions proposal is closely related to setting validation here.)
- Validation error messages are displayed to the user, prompting them to fix their mistake and try again.
A new WordPress update is always exciting. Test out the beta and give feedback to make it the best one yet. Make sure you update on August 16.
What do you want to see in 4.6? What’s your favorite feature? Answer in the comments below.
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