Call for Testing: AMP 1.4.2 on WordPress.com

AMP 1.4.2 will be deployed across all VIP sites on WordPress.com on Tuesday, February 11, 2020.

(Note: this does not include sites on the VIP Go platform.)

What’s New?

We’re upgrading from v0.6.2 to v1.4.2 and the AMP plugin has seen quite a few changes in between those releases. Here are some highlights:

• Additional rendering modes beyond the original “Reader” experience. You can now opt-in to render your entire site as “AMP-first” and leverage sanitization, CSS Tree Shaking, and various other features that now ship with the plugin. Or you can slowly and incrementally transition over.
• Continued rendering and compatibility improvements for Sanitizers, Embeds, and default elements including support for forms and widgets, better fallback support, and updates to match newer releases of the AMP spec.
• Added support for built-in WordPress.com and Jetpack features like Share buttons and Related Posts.

To learn more, you can browse through the changelog across the various releases.

What do I need to do?

In preparation for the release, we’ve run a series of automated scans and validation checks across VIP sites to verify that AMP pages continue to render as expected and validate correctly. We will be reaching out shortly to individual clients for whom we’ve uncovered potential issues.

To help aid testing in production, you can also load the new version of the AMP plugin for any page on your site by appending ?amp-next=1 to the URL (example). To verify that the new version is loading, you can check the AMP plugin version via the <meta name="generator" tag in the HTML source. You can also append #development=1 to load the browser validator and view validation results via the Developer Console.

We also recommend installing v1.4.2 of the plugin in your local environments and verifying that your AMP pages render as expected. You can use a tool like amphtml-validator to automate some of the testing as well.

If you have questions or run into issues, please open a support ticket with details and we will be happy to assist.