WordPress 4.2 is due to ship on April 23, 2015. Get a preview now of the upcoming features.
Customizer Theme Switching
When changing your theme, you previously had to activate a theme before you could begin customizing settings within the theme. This meant that many people would have a theme that was a work in progress.
In WordPress 4.2, improvements to how you install, preview, and browse for themes can be done inside Appearance -> Customizer.
Customizer 4.2
Customizer 4.1
Press This
If you’ve ever been browsing the web and found some article that you wanted to quote or cite on your own site, you may or may not have even known about the “Press This” bookmarklet. This little link can be saved into your bookmarks bar. When clicked, it lets you quickly share a link to the site you want within a post on your own site.
However, Press This hasn’t received much notice for a long time. In WordPress 4.2, Press This is updated to include a preview image of the link you want to share, as well as the bare bones other settings needed to properly publish your post.
Press This 4.2:
Press This 4.1.1 and older:
Plugin Installation
Previously, when you were browsing to install a plugin, you would be prompted to confirm that you want to install the plugin. Now, installing plugins has just one click to install and activate. Updates can also be quickly run from the Installed Plugins page.
Updating Plugins 4.1
Updating Plugins 4.2
Emoji Support
Primarily with an interest in supporting characters in Chinse, Japanese, and Korean languages, a happy side-effect is that emojis will be supported in post titles, body text, and even post-slugs (url/permalink addresses).
