WordPress 4.2 Update Announcement

WordPress 4.2 - nicknamed "Powell" is now available for download as of April 23. The version is named after Bud Powell, a legendary American jazz pianist. Here is a list of the major feature revisions:

• Improved Press This from the Tools Menu - This allows you to add the function to your browser bookmark bar or mobile device home screen so that you can quickly and easily share content such as video, images or website pages.
• Extended Character Support - Version 4.2 now supports native Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters, as well as musical and mathematical symbols and hieroglyphs. They have also added emoji's!
• Switch themes in the Customizer - You can now directly switch and preview themes from the Customizer.
• Support for more embeds - Links from Tumblr and Kickstartr can now be pasted within the editor and appear correctly.
• Streamlined Plugin Updates - Updates for plugins have been streamlined and simplified.

There have also been additions to WordPress 4.2 under the hood. These include:

• utf8mb4 support - Database character encoding has changed from utf8 to utf8mb4, which adds support for a whole range of new 4-byte characters.
• JavaScript accessibility - You can now send audible notifications to screen readers in JavaScript with wp.a11y.speak(). Pass it a string, and an update will be sent to a dedicated ARIA live notifications area.
• Shared term splitting - Terms shared across multiple taxonomies will be split when one of them is updated. Find out more in the Plugin Developer Handbook.
• Complex query ordering - WP_Query, WP_Comment_Query, and WP_User_Query now support complex ordering with named meta query clauses.

Update your WordPress installation as soon as possible as it provides all of the latest security patches and fixes in addition to all of the new improvements. You can also download the latest if needed. Click here to see the official WordPress 4.2 release announcement.