Just in time for Christmas, the amazing WordPress contribution team is getting geared up to release WordPress 4.1 on December 16. Right now, we can settle for the “WordPress 4.1 Release Candidate”

In case you missed it, here’s what to expect from WordPress 4.1:

• A new theme, Twenty Fifteen. It’s more blog focused, and is very much designed for mobile as well as desktop.
• A new “distraction free writing mode” – basically, it removes all of the stuff around your writing window so you can focus on your content.
• Language pack installation from the backend.  This is crucial as non-English downloads of WordPress are now surpassing downloads of the English version.
• Images now have a new inline editor.

And for the developers:

• Query enhancements (specifically to meta, date, comment, and taxonomy queries).
• “A single term shared across multiple taxonomies is now split into two when updated.”
• A better way for themes to handle “Title Tags”
• Enhancements to the Customizer API – this should hopefully standardize themes in using it for options panels (and, thusly, stripping out a lot of the option fluff that comes with themes)

For the full story, visit the WordPress blog – and if you’re feeling brave, why not take the new version for a spin!