WordPress 4.2 “Powell” now available

WordPress 4.2, named after American jazz Pianist, Bud Powell, is now available for download!

This update improves the overall writing experience in WordPress, and includes under-the-hood changes that developers will love:

• Press This has been completely revamped to maximize speed and ease of content sharing.
• utf8 has been updated to utf8mb4 to provide out-of-the-box support for a host of new characters, including native Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters, as well as musical and mathematical symbols, and emojis.
• You can now browse and preview themes directly in the Customizer.
• Plugins Screen has been updated for a more intuitive update and install. You can now seamlessly update your plugins.

This release also features under-the-hood changes that allow streamlined communication and sharing between developers.

• By leveraging wp.a11y.speak(), you can now send audible notifications to screen readers in JavaScript.
• Shared term splitting will auto split terms shared across multiple taxonomies once one of them is updated.
• WP_Query, WP_Comment_Query, and WP_User_Query now support complex ordering with named meta query clauses.

4.2 was led by Drew Jaynes, and had a total of 283 contributors.

You can download WordPress 4.2 directly or update from your dashboard!