Version 4.6 of WordPress, named “Pepper” in honor of jazz baritone saxophonist Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams III, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.6 help you to focus on the important things while feeling more at home.

Streamlined Updates

Don’t lose your place: stay on the same page while you update, install, and delete your plugins and themes.

Native Fonts

The WordPress dashboard now takes advantage of the fonts you already have, making it load faster and letting you feel more at home on whatever device you use.

Editor Improvements

Inline Link Checker Ever accidentally made a link to https://wordpress.org/example.org? Now WordPress automatically checks to make sure you didn’t.

Content Recovery As you type, WordPress saves your content to the browser. Recovering saved content is even easier with WordPress 4.6.

Under The Hood

Resource Hints

Resource hints help browsers decide which resources to fetch and preprocess. WordPress 4.6 adds them automatically for your styles and scripts making your site even faster.

Robust Requests

The HTTP API now leverages the Requests library, improving HTTP standard support and adding case-insensitive headers, parallel HTTP requests, and support for Internationalized Domain Names.

WP_Term_Query and WP_Post_Type

A new WP_Term_Query class adds flexibility to query term information while a new WP_Post_Type object makes interacting with post types more predictable.

Meta Registration API

The Meta Registration API has been expanded to support types, descriptions, and REST API visibility.

Translations On Demand

WordPress will install and use the newest language packs for your plugins and themes as soon as they’re available from WordPress.org’s community of translators.

JavaScript Library Updates

Masonry 3.3.2, imagesLoaded 3.2.0, MediaElement.js 2.22.0, TinyMCE 4.4.1, and Backbone.js 1.3.3 are bundled.

Customizer APIs for Setting Validation and Notifications

Settings now have an API for enforcing validation constraints. Likewise, customizer controls now support notifications, which are used to display validation errors instead of failing silently.

Multisite, now faster than ever

Cached and comprehensive site queries improve your network admin experience. The addition of WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query help craft advanced queries with less effort.

The Crew

This release was led by Dominik Schilling, backed up by Garth Mortensen as Release Deputy, and with the help of these fine individuals. There are 272 contributors with props in this release. Pull up some Pepper Adams on your music service of choice, and check out some of their profiles:

Special thanks go to Jerry Bates for producing the release video and Hugo Baeta for providing marketing graphics.

Finally, thanks to all the community translators who worked on WordPress 4.6. Their efforts make it possible to use WordPress 4.6 in 52 languages. The WordPress 4.6 release video has been captioned into 43 languages.

If you want to follow along or help out, check out Make WordPress and our core development blog. Thanks for choosing WordPress. See you soon for version 4.7!

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