Just a week after the release of WordPress 4.2 beta 1, the CMS giant released the second beta of version WordPress 4.2. Since the final release of the version WordPress 4.2 isn’t expected to happen before April, eager testers can start testing their code prior to the official release. Beta 2 release isn’t ready for production yet, and so make sure to setup a test site to test your code, instead of upgrading your live website to the new beta.

Let us now have a quick glimpse of the things you can do for testing your website against the beta 2 release.

• Added a Layer of Security

While developing a WordPress website, the security of the website is one of the biggest concerns among site owners. Luckily, WordPress provides several security measures to keep a site secure from vulnerabilities. For instance, it asks for FTP or SSH information when upgrading or installing plugins automatically. But this may not be true for all WordPress sites. In simple words, you might not be asked to enter any FTP connection information before a plugin update. But beta 2 has resolved this issue, and added support for entering “FTP and SSH credentials” at the time of updating plugins.

• Better Cross-browser Support for Emoji

Observing the growing popularity of Emoji characters, support for the same was added with the release of beta 1, however, with beta 2 you’ll experience improved cross-browser support for emoji. Jaynes, the lead of the beta 2 release, encourage users using an older browser to report about any issues they’ve while using emoji.

• “Press This” Feature Has Been Refined

With the release of the first beta version of WordPress 4.2, “Press This” feature was redesigned, to make it more mobile-friendly. And now, with the second beta release, this feature has been further refined with the introduction of auto-embedded media. In addition, content scanning has also improved.

• Multiple Bug Fixes

Just as you know that WordPress releases bug fixes, with every version, and the new beta release has introduced over 70 changes within a week after beta 1 release.

• Addition to the WP_Comment_Query Class

WP_Comment_Query has helped post authors to retrieve comments from the database. In order to make this class more useful, beta 2 has added a constructor and better method consistency in WP_Comment_Query. Let’s have a detailed view of this:
Constructor is the simple function of a class which gets executed automatically when an object of the class is created. However, constructor isn’t used when executing the wp_comment_query class. Here’s an example of WP_Comment_Query:

$comments_query = new WP_Comment_Query; [here we are creating the object of WP_Comment_Query class ]
$comments = $comments_query->query( $args ); [here we are executing wp_comment query using the query funtion ]

However, with the beta 2 release, a constructor has been added and method consistency has been improved in WP_Comment_Query. For example, in the proposed beta version we can set our query parameter directly on object creation as shown below:

$args = array(
'author_email' => '[email protected]'
);
$comments_query = new WP_Comment_Query($args);

Although, both codes will produce the same result, but the second one is fast, as it comes with the capability to initialize the query argument at the same time because of the constructor.

Wrapping Up!

As a WordPress user or developer, you’ll certainly be interested in learning about some exciting new improvements that takes place in the WordPress ecosystem. If you’ve already tested WordPress 4.2 beta 1, it’s time to get yourself prepared for testing beta 2 release made available by the CMS giant.

WordPress Beta Tester plugin will help you get hooked up with the new beta release easily. If you don’t wish to use the plugin, you can download the beta zip file from WordPress.org beta 2 announcement post.