What’s New in WordPress Version 4.6

Video Transcript

This video is gonna look at the changes to your WordPress site as a result of the update in WordPress version 4.6. Now, before you update your WordPress site with these major updates, here’s my suggested process. Yeah, it’s a little bit lengthy but it’s better to err on the side of safety whenever it’s concerning your business site, that’s my opinion anyway. So number one, go ahead and do a full backup of your files and database before you do anything. That way you know that you’ve got a backup of a functional WordPress site before you start doing any of that stuff. Number two, update all your plugins and themes. Number three, test your site to make sure that everything is working after you’ve updated your plugins and themes, click links, check images, refresh the page. And number four, do another full backup. Number five, update to the new WordPress version. Number six, test your site again. Click those links, check the images, refresh your page, everything.

Now then, if everything’s working perfectly with all the new updates, do another full backup, both database and files. Now that you’ve got your WordPress site all up to date, let’s have a look around at some of the new stuff that’s been added or changed. Now over here on the left I’ve got the new version 4.6, on the right I’ve got the prior version, 4.5 something. Now, if we take a look here on one of the pages at wordpress.org that it goes over some of these updates, we’ve got number one, the streamline updates. That refers to the plugins and themes.

When we go to Add New Plugins, the actual add new plugin page is exactly the same. But what’s changed on the new version is that they no longer take you to a different page in order to activate the plugin that you just installed. For example, if we install on the old version the theme check plugin, just click on install now, it takes you to a different page to activate the plugin. No big deal but still, it’s taking you to a different page. We do the same thing on the new version, install now, even that looks different. We’re on the same exact page where you can now activate that plugin that was just installed. It makes things a little more streamlined.

What else we got? Oh yes, the native fonts. If we come on back to the dashboard here I can show you this. Basically, what this is saying is that it’s now taking advantage of the fonts you already have on your system and within your browser, which does make it load a lot faster. Before, what it would do is you would use the open SANS Google Fonts. So, in order to get the fonts on your admin area of the dashboard, that’s all I’m talking about here it’s the admin area, it had to first go to Google Fonts to get those fonts which took a bit of a hit on the resources and slowed things down just a hair, but now it doesn’t.

It’s pulling those fonts directly from your system. So depending upon what operating system or browser you’re using, yours may look different than what mine is right now on this video, and that ‘s why. So if you look at this, the old version, you can see the fonts here is just a little bit thicker than they are here on the new version. That’s just a little bit of a change there. And another one is, oh yes, in the editor. This holds true for both the page and post editor. We’ve got a couple of updates here that they’re talking about the inline link checker which frankly, I couldn’t get to work for me but maybe you’ll have a different experience. But if you incorrectly add a URL or add a URL that’s broken, this inline link checker’s supposed to figure that out and tell you. For example, this one here is obviously incorrect and if we click on this, you can see in the editor that that is not a proper URL for wordpress.org. O2RG is not a good URL.

And what it should be doing is telling you just like it is here with this misspelled word with a red line or a red dotted box around the URL that, “Hey, this is not working properly.” So again, I couldn’t get this to work for me but that is a addition as they’re talking about here. Another is content recovery. If say you’re halfway through a large post, the power goes out, well you no longer have to rely on the last revision of your WordPress post because as you type, WordPress saves your content to the browser so it’s makes recovering a saved content a lot easier and you don’t have to worry about going back and retyping everything in between revisions.

And another item that they’re not talking about here is related to the post or page editor, deals with embedded objects. Now, this is the old version here and I took the same URL from a YouTube video and put it in the new visual editor and I am able to drag this around like I could with images, but as a result of that improvement, if you wanna call it that, it’s not scaling that video to the size of the window. In other words, it’s adding a scroll bar for me to be able to see the entire video but on the old version, I’m not able to drag and move this video around or the embedded object around but it does automatically scale that embedded object, in this case the video, to the size of the window.

So I’ll let you determine if that’s a plus or a minus, but maybe that’s something they’ll work on in version 4.61. But if you scroll down here, you can see that there are a whole lot of other developer related improvements to WordPress 4.6 that you can’t really see but improves the security and the performance of your site. So the main thing that I wanted to go over here in addition to these updates, is that before you do any major updating to your WordPress site, consider doing those seven steps I talked about at the beginning of the video; backup, update, check, backup. And that’s gonna bring us to the end of this video on what’s new in version 4.6 of WordPress. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.