WordPress 3.9 arrives with better media editing, gallery previews, audio and video playlists, and more

WordPress.org today announced the debut of WordPress 3.9, which adds a slew of “refinements” to the blog management tool. You can download the new release now from WordPress.org/Download (it’s 6.0MB).

Dubbed “Smith” in honor of African-American jazz musician Jimmy Smith, WordPress 3.9 is supposed to give users a better understanding of how their content will look once it is published.

The new features are as follows:

• Improved visual editing: The new visual editor has improved speed, accessibility, and mobile support. You can paste into it from your word processor without wasting time to clean up messy styling.
• Edit images easily: With quicker access to crop and rotation tools, it’s now much easier to edit your images while editing posts and scale images directly in the editor.
• Drag and drop your images: Uploading your images is now as simple as grabbing them from your desktop and dropping them in the editor.
• Gallery previews: Galleries display a beautiful grid of images right in the editor, just like they do in your published post.
• Do more with audio and video: Images have galleries, and now media clips have playlists.
• Live widget and header previews: Add, edit, and rearrange your site’s widgets right in the theme customizer: preview your changes live and only save them when you’re ready. The improved header image tool also lets you upload, crop, and manage headers while customizing your theme.
• New theme browser: WordPress says you can now “lose yourself in the boundless supply of free WordPress.org themes.” Ha.

WordPress 3.8 was released in December. The company is pushing a faster release as of late, but version 3.8 came later than we expected, and we would not be surprised whatsoever if the company took its sweet time with the 4.0 release.