Call for Testing: WordPress 5.5 (Release Candidate)

WordPress 5.5 is scheduled for public release on Tuesday, August 11, 2020, and the 5.5 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available for testing. We recommend clients review the changelog and the WordPress 5.5 Field Guide as part of their testing.

What Is Being Added or Changed?

We outlined some of the upcoming changes when the beta version was released. We’d also like to point out some of the newer developer notes that have recently been published.

Block editor: features and improvements

The latest block editor improvements have been detailed, including some new block tools. And there are a number of changes to WordPress React Components in WordPress 5.5. The Block API changes have also been outlined.

XML sitemaps

There are more detailed notes on the new sitemap functionality that’s been added to WordPress in version 5.5. In particular, the core development team has provided detailed information on how to customize sitemaps and disable them. There is also a list of new classes, functions, hooks and filters.

Language Changes

WordPress is changing some terminology “aimed at maintaining a welcoming environment for all contributors while improving the clarity and inclusivity of the codebase”.

Notably:

• blacklist_keys has been renamed to disallowed_keys.
• comment_whitelist has been renamed to comment_previously_approved.
• Several related functions have been deprecated.

For a more detailed list of changes, see the RC 1 release announcement.

Developer Notes

A set of developer notes is now available. Here are the highlights.

• Themes: functions calling locate_template()now have a return value. Starting in 5.5, the following functions now return false if the template file is not found, and void if the template is found and loaded:
  • get_header()
  • get_footer()
  • get_sidebar()
  • get_template_part()
• Default categories for custom post types
• A new default_term argument has also been added to register_taxonomy().
• Comments: default comment_type value now enforced. After upgrading to 5.5, an upgrade routine will be scheduled via cron and run to update all preexisting comments with an empty comment_type to comment. This process will batch comments 100 at a time. The batch size can be adjusted using the wp_update_comment_type_batch_size filter.
• WordPress 5.5 will bring a few changes to the values wp_update_comment() returns.
• TinyMCE: TinyMCE has been updated to version 4.9.10

Other Changes

• It’s now possible to filter archive pages
• There is a new wp_get_environment_type() function
• WordPress now attempts to invalidate PHP files when Core, Plugins, or Themes are updated. To help with this, a new function is available, wp_opcache_invalidate(), as well as a method to disable it to limit alerting.
• Logo images inserted using get_custom_logo() or the_custom_logo() will no longer link to the homepage when visitors are on that page, and there are associated styling changes.

When Will WordPress 5.5 Be Deployed?

VIP Go: WordPress 5.5 will be rolled out to all WordPress.com VIP and VIP Go sites on Tuesday, August 11, 2020.

WordPress.com VIP: As with all Core upgrades, we’ll be pushing incremental updates leading up to the public release.

Please note that the deployment dates are subject to change if critical issues are discovered during testing or the public release is delayed. We’ll post updates to the Lobby if the dates do change.

What Should I Do?

We highly recommend updating your local development environments to the beta release using the Beta Tester plugin or updating it to track 5.5 via either the Subversion or GitHub repos.

For sites on VIP Go, you can have your non-production sites switched to WordPress 5.5. If this is something you’re interested in, please open a ticket and we can set it up for you.

And, as always, if you have any questions related to this release, please open a support ticket and we will be happy to assist.