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Coming Soon - WordPress 4.2!

Posted 20th April, 2015 by Aliysa

It's that time again: we're only a few days away from the launch of WordPress 4.2, the latest WordPress update. The previous release mainly focused on enhancing your writing experience and this time around they’re introducing features to help you better manage your growing list of plugins and themes. That's not all though; WordPress 4.2 is also crammed full of developments to revolutionise your experience, plus there’s the usual bug fixes and security updates.

So, without further ado, I’ll take you through the most notable features and changes that you can expect to see in the latest WordPress update.

Compare Your Themes:

Choosing a theme for your new website is a big decision and one that shouldn't be taken lightly. Finding the perfect template takes time and if you’re anything like me, 2 hours quickly passes and you find yourself still looking for the one.

With time being of the essence WordPress 4.2 lets you quickly compare themes by switching between them at the click of a button from within the 'Customiser' section.

Easily Update Your Plugins:

In the past, plugin updates took place away from the main plugin management page. In WordPress 4.2 there’s no need to leave the main management page you can update all of your plugins directly from the management page.

Plugin Updates View

Share Third-Party Content with 'Press This':

Sharing commentary about the page you've recently visited is easier than ever before thanks to the full makeover which the 'Press This' tool has undergone.

Now, whenever you go to share a webpage using 'Press This', a stripped back version of the normal text editor will appear in a pop up. WordPress will automatically pull up the page's title, image, a short extract and a clickable link to the source; you can then edit these details, add your own tags and categories and post it directly to your site.

There's also a nifty new feature which lets you add the ‘Press This’ bookmark to your mobile home screen.

Express Yourself With Emojis:

Exciting news for all you emoji fans out there, WordPress 4.2 has catered for you with full emoji icon support. You can use them in posts, pages and even as part of your website's slug!

WordPress Emoji


Behind the Scenes:

As ever, it's not just the front end of the dashboard that's had work done, the WordPress 4.2 includes a range of under-the-hood changes, designed to make life easier for web developers:

For the third update in a row, taxonomies have been extensively improved. Now, terms which are shared across multiple taxonomies will be split up. This has finally solved the problem where updating one taxonomy term would automatically update all other taxonomies which shared the same name.

Thanks to some function edits, error responses which have been generated by Javascript are shown on the screen. It's a little detail, but one that helps you to resolve errors faster and get a better understanding of your website's behaviour.


How to Update to WordPress 4.2:

WordPress 4.2 is scheduled to launch on April 22nd, If you are currently running a WordPress site you will have the option to manually update your website as soon as the update goes live from within your WordPress Dashboard. Before you run the upgrade we highly recommend checking that the plugins on your site are compatible.

If you want to try out 4.2 before it goes live then you can update to the Beta version now. Be aware that the 4.2 Beta is not a stable version of WordPress and should therefore only be trialled on test websites.


What's your opinion on WordPress 4.2? Do you like the new features? I'd love to hear your points of view in our comments section.

Categories: WordPress

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