On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the brand new version of WordPress – WordPress 4.6 – right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, episode number 298.

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today will probably be the shortest podcast in the history of Your Website Engineer Podcast. Okay, maybe not the shortest per se, but it is going to be relatively short because I’ve come down with a gigantic case of poison ivy.

I don’t know if you can really get a case of the poison ivies, but I have poison ivy pretty much down half of my face, around the back of my neck, it’s all over my arm, it’s spreading down to my legs, it is just the weirdest thing. I haven’t been in the woods or the forest or like been hiking or anything, I don’t know where it came from and A.) it itches like crazy and B.) I just took two Benadryl and my wife says I’m going to be ridiculously tired very, very shortly, so, I’m just going to try to get through an episode here real quick so that you can just be aware of what’s going on with the changes and the new things that came out in WordPress 4.6 that was released just a couple hours ago.

Before we do that, I wanna let you know about a couple of different things going on in the WordPress space. The first one is instant browser notifications, and this is a message that came from wordpress.com, but it’s a feature that wordpress.com, in fact it’s a wordpress.com hosted site’s, that they have the ability to get browser notif – desktop notifications that can come right to their computer. And so it’s a feature that is built in to both Chrome and Firefox, and you can control your notifications right within your settings page, and so you can turn on browser notifications so when you get likes or comments even if you don’t have wordpress.com open.

So right now if you’re using wordpress.com and you get a notification across any, any other wordpress.com notification that will normally appear in a notification in the upper right hand black admin bar when you’re logged into wordpress.com and now this just toggles the ability to get them right on your desktop, giving browser/desktop notification. So if this is something that’s interesting to you and you want to be more distracted with more notifications then you might want to check this out.

The other thing that I want to share today is WordSesh. You’ll find out more at wordsesh.org and it’s basically in three days it’s going to be on Saturday from 0 UTC to 2300 UTC and it is 24 hours of WordCamp-like presentations so 24 one-hour presentations all around the globe and just happening around the world.

So that’s what it is, it’s completely free, you can sign up and subscribe and you get notifications. Looks like there’s some really neat speakers that are happening and talking about things like “How to Fork WordPress” and “101 Ways to Rock as a Freelancer” and “Beyond Whitespace: Designing for Complex Content” and there’s a Pecha who was the lead organizer of WordCamp Europe is doing a WordCamp Europe and global WordPress community session.

So there’s a lot of really good sessions, “Introduction to WooCommerce Development: Move All Things to WordPress.” So there’s some good information if you don’t have a WordCamp this weekend to go to, this is definitely something that you can sign up for. And of course, you can, since it’s free, they’re gonna record all of it and you can, they’ll be able to watch it later, and you can watch WordSesh One, Two, and Three, since this is the fourth year you can see all of those past videos will be up online as well. You can find those from their home pages/blogs. So those are the two big announcements happening in the WordPress space.

Okay, in the “Is There a Plugin for That?” section today, I wanna talk about a plugin called Expire Passwords. And this will require certain users to change their passwords on a regular basis.

So, it’s a very customizable plugin and by default it’s set up for every ninety days and for non-admins to change their passwords, but you can set up any level if you want everybody to change their password every 30 days, 180 days, or if you just want admins to do it, if you want anybody that’s lower than an admin, it’s really a pretty neat plugin and it’s a great plugin if you have multiple people using your website, whether you have multiple admins or you’re running a membership site and you’ve got hundreds of people logging into your WordPress site all the time, it’s probably a good idea to have them change and update those passwords on a regular basis.

So if this is some sort of plugin that you need, it’s called Expire Passwords and you can find it in the WordPress repository under “expire passwords.”

And so with that, let’s go ahead and dive into what’s happening in WordPress 4.6. Its codename is “Pepper” in honor of jazz baritone saxophone Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams III. Now it’s available to download in an update as of right now, and there’s probably been millions of people that have updated their websites as of right now, which is only a few hours after the update has come out.

The new features in 4.6 will help you focus on the important things, while you feel more at home. And I’m gonna let Jerry, who did the voiceover for the recording, I’m just gonna tell you some of the brief things that happened in 4.6 and then I’ll come back and we’ll just kind of dive in and we’ll talk about some of those things.

Jerry: WordPress 4.6 Pepper, named for jazz legend “Pepper” Adams, gets you where you need to go faster – whether you’re adding a theme, updating your site’s plugins, or navigating the WordPress dashboard. WordPress 4.6 includes a simpler workflow for adding and activating new themes for plugins on your site.

Now you will never lose your place when performing these tasks. Everything happens right on one screen. Improvements to the Editor in WordPress 4.6 make it smarter than ever. If you add a broken link, WordPress will let you know, allowing you to update the link before publishing it to your site.

If you lose your Internet connection while writing, it’s good to know that drafts are saved locally to your browser. When you return to edit, WordPress notifies you if there is a more recent draft, so nothing gets lost. You may also notice that fonts are slightly different when managing your site. Your WordPress dashboard now uses the same native fonts as your operating system, which means pages load faster and performance is improved overall.

In addition to everything you see, WordPress 4.6 includes a host of performance and stability improvements to the software you rely on every day. WordPress 4.6 Pepper – a focused update that gets you where you need to go, faster.

Dustin Hartzler: All right, and that is a just a brief, brief overview of what happened in WordPress 4.6. The big thing is the streamlined updates so you never have to refresh those pages when you activate a new theme, or if you update a new theme, update a plugin, all of those are just, they just automatically go. You see that familiar two spinning arrows as things are updating, like we’ve had in the plugin section now it’s happening and it’s coming to the themes area.

Another thing that’s really nice is native fonts. So they’re no longer loading a third party font like Open Sans. Now it takes advantage of the available font that you have on your computer, so the default font that’s on your computer so it’ll make it load faster and it’ll feel you, it’ll make it feel more like your computer that you’re working on. So that’s really nice as well.

Another couple things is the offline, or the inline link chatter, checker, which is really nice, so if you’re typing in the URL, you’re copying and pasting the URL, then it, when you’re in the visual mode, you have the ability to see, it will visually let you know if, yes, that’s a valid link, or no, that’s not a valid link. So I think this is super helpful that will allow us to, if you’re copy and pasting links or you’re hand typing out a link that make sure that you’re getting it right so you don’t get that notification from the broken link checker that you have a link that you just published in a post that’s incorrect.

Another thing is that WordPress saves your content to your browser so when it does that then it saves it as a draft as well so if something happens and you go offline, when you try to hit publish, all is not lost like it was before. It’s saved there on your browser and you have the ability to go in and you can restore that data really nicely.

Those are the big, the big features that are built in. I feel like this is just not really an underwhelming release, but it just seems like, “Yeah, we’re making very minor improvements,” and if, I guess if we look back at the end of the year, if in December we look back and see how many things that have been improved and changed in the three revisions, three versions of WordPress that we get from year to year, I’m sure that we’ll see, like, huge gains and we’re just breaking them down into smaller, smaller chunks.

There’s a lot of stuff under the hood as well and some of it’s kind of on the boring side so I’m not gonna go through all of the different things, but there were some other noteworthy things to talk about. The number of arguments for register_meta has decreased from four to three, the WordPress 4.6 standardizes the registration of meta keys that comments can now be cached by a persistent object cache, and so that is something for developers who plugin modify comment data directly are encouraged to change them and use various comment APIs to make that work a little bit nicer.

There is now a WP_post_type for each register post type. There is a WordPress 4.6 now is W3C specification that helps browsers determine which resource it should fetch, and pre-process to improve page performance. There is internationalization and localization improvement. There’s some work done with the widgets to register widgets and unregister widgets, and there has been improvements to the customizer with the addition of an API for validating and setting values.

So, and there’s also some been improvements for WordPress multi-site as well. So there was 272 individuals that contributed to WordPress 4.6. I was just way too busy in this past quarter to actually even look at any tickets and try to figure out what needed help and what needed work. So as always, like, I’m trying to, I’m trying to help in that way, but I’m just finding that I can give a lot more value to helping out WooCommerce right now as that’s part of my day-to-day, I see the ins and outs of WooCommerce all the time.

So that is just rolled out, it rolled out just again a couple hours ago on Tuesday, it’s the 16th of August, and I’m just really excited that this is here, now we get ready to do another release cycle. We’ve got another three more months or so until December when we get a brand new version of WordPress with some new features, some new security bugs, or some new security fixes, and things along those lines.

So that’s really all I wanna share with you today. Again, I don’t have a lot of time because of my poison ivy and I wanna itch it, and it’s, it’s, just, I don’t know how I got it, that’s the big thing, like, it just all of a sudden came from nowhere and now it’s spread across my body and so I’m doing my best to try to keep it away from the rest of my family and I’ve been quarantined down in the basement but that’s okay. We’ll get rid of it and next week I’ll have a more full-length show for you. So until then, take care, and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.