Jetpack 8.9 will be deployed to VIP Go on Thursday, September 3rd, 2020. The upgrade is expected to be performed at 15:00 UTC (11:00am EDT). This deployment date and time is subject to change if issues are discovered during testing of the Jetpack release.
The beta for Jetpack 8.9 is available now, and the download link is at the top of the beta release notice.
What is being added or changed?
Blocks
Donations
The new Donations Block allows you to easily accept and process donations on your site.
To give it a try, open the Block editor and try to add a Donations block to your post. Let us know what you think!
Social Previews
You can now preview how your posts will look on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Search Results even before you hit the Publish button.
Check this out from the Jetpack sidebar appearing in the block editor.
Form
In this release, we’ve added 3 things to the Form block:
- A new “Consent” field you can add to any new or existing form.
- A new “Newsletter Sign-up” form option offered to you when you create a new form, to save you some time if you plan to use your form to collect email addresses.
- A new panel in the block’s sidebar to help you integrate the Form block with a plugin that handles newsletter sign-ups, Creative Mail. In that panel, you will have the option to install and activate the plugin if you do not use it on your site yet.
You can try to use those new options and let us know if everything works well.
Connection
We’ve made a number of changes to better couple your site’s connection to WordPress.com with the status of features like Protect, Monitor, SSO, Subscriptions, or Stats on your site.
To test this, on a new or existing site, ensure that toggling those features on and off still works, and that the features themselves still work.
A full list of changes is available in the release notes and the commit log.
What do I need to do?
We recommend:
- Installing the beta release on your non-production sites using these instructions.
- Running through the testing flows outlined in the Jetpack Testing Guide.
As you’re testing a few things to keep in mind:
- Check your browser’s JavaScript console and see if there are any errors reported by Jetpack there.
- Use “Debug Bar” or “Query Monitor” to help make PHP notices and warnings more noticeable and report anything you see.
Questions?
If you have testing feedback or questions related to this release (or Jetpack in general), please open a support ticket and we will be happy to assist.
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