WordPress got a major update today, including a number of new features and improvements.

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General updates:

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Press This:

Press This button got an update, allowing you to more easily share content across the web to your blog. Press This is a bookmarket that you can drag to your bookmarks bar and share youtube videos, twitter, and more.

Extended Character support:

WordPress now supports many new characters and languages including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean characters, as well as many musical and mathematical symbols, and hieroglyphs. Also emojis can now be added directly to your WordPress blog.

Theme Switcher:

The 4.2 update now lets you search and preview your installed themes directly from the Customizer, as well as edit themes to tsee what they look like, all before applying the theme to your blog.

More Embeds:

The new update also increased the amount of embeds, allowing you to embed Tumblr and Kickstarter posts right on your blog.

Plugin Updates:

One of my favorite features is that now you can update your plugins right from the plugin page rather than having to go to a separate loading page to update plugins. This will really speed up plugin maintenance updating.

Miscellaneous UI Updates:

Also there are a few UI dates adding some more blue-ish coloring vs the monocolor coloring of the general UI. Personally I used a separate admin editor to make it a bit darker, I wasn’t thrilled with the color but it is a little nicer than the original monocolor. I could see this color getting old fast though so that’s why I changed it manually.

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Developer updates:

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Upgraded character encoding:

Now WordPress has utf8mb4 support as opposed to the former utf8. utf8mb4 adds support for many new 4-byte characters.

JavaScript accessibility:

Now WordPress has the ability for admins to send audible notifications to blog viewers via JavaScript with the string wp.a11y.speak(). When you pass this code as a string, an update will be sent to a dedicated ARIA live notifications area. An interesting and cool feature but is likely to be overlooked for the most part.

Shared term splitting:

This is a great update for developers, as this will allow the existence of the same term across multiple taxonomies without conflict, since the term will be split when one of them is updated.

Complex query ordering:

For advanced developers only, WP_Query, WP_Comment_Query, and WP_User_Query now support complex ordering with named meta query clauses. This is a powerful update which will make many developers very happy (myself included, when I get a chance to use it).

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Just make sure to remember to back up both your database and your files before upgrading!

Here is the official video released by WordPress regarding the 4.2 update:

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