WordPress 4.6 Improves Theme & Plugin Management

WordPress 4.6 is finally here, and this time, it actually has some features that are worth updating for.

Named ‘Pepper' after the musician Pepper Adams, WordPress 4.6 improves theme and plugin management by allowing you to update, install, and delete directly from the Plugins and Themes interfaces.

It also boasts native (and thus faster) fonts, a better content recovery feature, and an automatic inline broken link checker. Not too shabby, WordPress.

Theme & Plugin Management and Inline Link Checking

The ability to update and delete plugins and themes without leaving the Plugins and Themes interfaces makes it a lot easier to manage your site. I'm a big fan of this feature, because it's those extra few seconds that were taken up by page redirects that made WordPress so tiring to use at times.

As for the automatic inline link checker, WordPress now alerts you to the fact that you have inserted a broken link into your page or article. A small, but intelligent upgrade to the inline linking feature introduced in version 4.5

Better Content Recovery and Faster Fonts

In the case of a lost internet connection while writing a post, WordPress has been saving and recovering work for a while now. But with WordPress 4.6, the platform now stores unsaved work to your browser, making data loss ever rarer.

Finally, WordPress 4.6 now uses fonts that your browser already has to hand, meaning that pages load (fractionally) faster. I doubt this will impact the average WordPress user at all, but when it comes to speed, every little helps.

Is this a mind-blowingly awesome WordPress update? No – but it isn't a bad one either.

I ruffled a few feathers when I spoke out about the lacklustre nature of WordPress 4.4, but I can already see the benefits emanating from the new features found in WordPress 4.6, so kudos to the WordPress dev team and community for this one.

For more information, check out the official announcement.