WordPress 4.2 helps you communicate and share, globally. Its time to update once again!

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WordPress 4.2 is featuring:

An easier way to share content

Clip it, edit it, publish it. Get familiar with the new and improved Press This. From the Tools menu, add Press This to your browser bookmark bar or your mobile device home screen. Once installed you can share your content with lightning speed. Sharing your favorite videos, images, and content has never been this fast or this easy.

Drag the bookmarklet below to your bookmarks bar. Then, when you’re on a page you want to share, simply “press” it.

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Switch themes in the Customizer

Browse and preview your installed themes from the Customizer. Make sure the theme looks great with your content, before it debuts on your site.

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Even more embeds

Paste links from Tumblr.com and Kickstarter and watch them magically appear right in the editor. With every release, your publishing and editing experience get closer together.

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Streamlined plugin updates

Goodbye boring loading screen, hello smooth and simple plugin updates. Click Update Nowand watch the magic happen.

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WordPress 4.2 Highlights

• The Finer Points of WordPress 4.2
  • Press This has been completely revamped. Clip it, edit it, publish it. Get familiar with the new and improved Press This. From the Tools menu, add Press This to your browser bookmark bar or your mobile device home screen. Once installed you can share your content with lightning speed. Sharing your favorite videos, images, and content has never been this fast or this easy.
  • Now you can browse and switch installed themes in the Customizer. Browse and preview your installed themes from the Customizer. Make sure the theme looks great with your content, before it debuts on your site.
  • More intuitive plugin update and install from the Plugins Screen. Goodbye boring loading screen, hello smooth and simple plugin updates. Click Update Now and watch the magic happen.
  • Writing in WordPress, whatever your language, just got better. 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. Don’t use any of those characters? You can still have fun — emoji are now available in WordPress! Get creative and decorate your content with 💙, 🐸, 🐒, 🍕, and all the many other emoji.

• WordPress 4.2 For Developers
  • The new wp.a11y.speak() API is available. When a change on the page happens, you can make sure that screen reader users are notified with this helper.
  • The default admin color scheme has been tweaked. Minor, but if you use the WordPress colors directly in your code, you should update the code.
  • When possible, WordPress now will use utf8mb4 as the database character set.
  • Terms shared across multiple taxonomies will now be split into separate terms when one of them is updated.
  • The experimental TinyMCE views API has continued to evolve. As this is an experimental API, use in production is not recommended unless you closely follow the development as breaking changes are possible.
  • Two UI components used by core, spinners and admin notices, have been improved. The change to spinners is a change to how they are added and the change to admin notices is the ability to optionally make them dismissible.
  • Complex queries – Support specific meta_query clauses to be used with orderby, added to WP_Query, WP_Comment_Query, and WP_User_Query

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!