WordPress 4.2 New Features

The latest WordPress 4.2 “Powell” has been released, advertised with the slogan “Communication, Sharing & Simplicity”. “Communication, Sharing & Simplicity”.

[box color=”orange”]Release 4.2 has been named after virtuosic, jazz pianist:
Bud Powell who was a leading figure in the development of “bebop”.[/box]

That’s my favorite new feature. As I tend to keep plugins on all of my sites up to date, smooth and simple plugin updates without loading screen makes this process much more user friendly

New and improved “Press This” feature. Once installed in your browser bookmarks you can share your favorite videos, images, and content from other website.

WordPress 4.2 supports a host of new characters out-of-the-box, including native Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters, musical and mathematical symbols, and hieroglyphs.

There is also a side effect of this with emoji support added with this feature, which is causing an additional wp emoji script loading with every page or post.

However developers already have found the solution, and created a “Disable Emojis“ plugin. This plugin disables the new emoji functionality in WordPress 4.2.

Links from Tumblr.com and Kickstarter are supported in WP editor, and their content will embed straight to your post or page.

Customizer is getting even more powerful, as we can now browse and preview all of the installed themes before applying them to the site.

As usual there is plenty more of code updates, making WP more secure and faster.

SUMMARY: WordPress 4.2 is maybe not the most impressive from the latest releases, however some new features will definitely make WP enthusiasts happier.

Watch the official 4.2 release video below to see the new features in action: