WP 4.2 Powell – New Version Released

WordPress has just released WP v. 4.2, named "Powell" in honor of jazz artist Bud Powell. Learn about the new WP 4.2 updates, security fixes and software improvements and what to do before updating your WordPress installation in this article.

New WordPress Version: WordPress 4.2

WordPress v. 4.2 Powell focuses on making communication and content sharing easier.

Here are just a few of the changes you will find in the new WordPress version:

Press This App - New And Improved

Coinciding with the release of version 4.2 is a new and improved "Press This" tool (Tools > Available Tools) ...

Press This is a simple little tool that lets you share your favorite content (e.g. text, images and videos) online and create new blog posts quite easily.

You can add this tool to your mobile desktop or your browser bookmarks bar.

When visiting a web site, click on Press This to repost the content to your site. You can share the latest news stories from around the web, videos from YouTube, tweets from Twitter, Instagram pictures, and more ...

Once you have grabbed your content, edit it straight from Press This before you save or publish it to your site.

Extended Character Support

With the increased use of WordPress worldwide, WP 4.2 now provides extensive "out of the box" support for logographic characters used in languages like Chinese, Korean and Japanese, as well as musical and mathematical symbols, hieroglyphs and emojis ...

Just use your native device keyboard to compose your posts and WordPress will do the rest ...

Additional WordPress 4.2 Release Notes

Here are some other changes you will see when you next log into your WordPress admin area after updating to WordPress 4.2:

Switch Themes In The Customizer

You can now browse, switch and customize installed themes from the WP Theme Customizer ...

This lets you make sure that your theme looks good and works well with your content before going live on your blog ...

Even More Embeds

Since version 4.0, WordPress has been allowing users to embed YouTube videos and content from Twitter by simply pasting links.

With v. 4.2 WordPress continues to add more embed support for "third-party" content with your site ...

You can now paste links from Kickstarter.com and Tumblr into your posts ...

Embedding content is as simple as pasting a URL onto its own line in a post.

For a full list embeds supported by WordPress go here.

Simple Plugin Updating

WordPress has done away with the loading screen when updating plugins and streamlined the plugin updating process ...

Now, the process of updating your plugins takes place "behind the scenes" without leaving your Plugins screen ...

Additional Enhancements

In addition to the improvements and enhancements listed above, WP version 4.2 also includes a number of other enhancement and bug-fixes.

Important Update Tips

We recommend doing the following before upgrading to any new version of WordPress:

• Perform a complete backup of all your WordPress files and database.
   
• Search online for any problems or issues that other WordPress users may be experiencing with the new version. This includes incompatibilities and conflicts with plugins, themes, and other issues (search for "WP 4.2 issues" or "WP 4.2 errors", then go through some of the results to see what kind of issues and errors users are experiencing).
   
• Once you have done the above, then upgrade to the new version as soon as possible to ensure that your site remains protected against any security vulnerabilities found in previous versions.

Note: Google recently introduced a new change on April 21, 2015 that will affect the search engine ranking of websites that are not mobile-friendly.

You can read Google's official announcement here: Official Google Webmaster Blog

Also, you can test to see if your website meets Google's mobile-responsive criteria using Google's own Mobile Testing Tool ...

Enter the URL of your website into the Mobile-Friendly Test field and click the "Analyze" button to see if your site meets Google's mobile-friendly criteria ...

If your site is not mobile-friendly, consider switching to WordPress as soon as possible to avoid SEO problems ...

If you're already using WordPress, then simply switch to a theme that is fully responsive (most new WordPress themes are).

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