New Release: Jetpack 9.9

Jetpack 9.9 has been deployed to all VIP sites.

What is being added or changed?

Major Enhancements

Carousel: improve carousel usability, performance, accessibility, mobile friendliness.
Carousel: improve stability, fixes multiple bugs.

Enhancements

Blocks: additional automated tests to improve reliability.
Carousel: Add comment indicator icon to carousel comments icon.
Dashboard: provide more useful information and an option to contact support when there are display issues in the Jetpack dashboard.
Editor: added Social Preview panel to the pre-publish sidebar to increase visibility.

Improved compatibility

Blocks: make sure connection notices in blocks work with the widget and customizer block editors.
Carousel: Ensure refactored carousel is compatible with Twenty Nineteen theme styles.
Full Site Editing: disable admin bar in Jetpack notifications to prevent keystroke hijacking in the Site Editor.
Podcast Block: Ensure compatibility with latest version of Gutenberg plugin and WordPress 5.8.
Shortcode Embeds: enable compatibility with WordPress’ “Lazy Loading”.
Site Logo: improve compatibility with WordPress 5.8’s new Site Logo block.
Slideshow Block: update icon.

Bug fixes

AMP: Fix top AMP ad unit from being cropped on mobile devices
Blocks: GIF block supports the widget editor and customizer preview pane.
Carousel: Fix intermittent issue with unresponsive prev button.
Carousel: Fix image quality on carousel zoom.
Carousel: Set pagination font weight to normal to avoid conflicts with theme styles.
Carousel: disable transitions on prev/next images to prevent flash effect on pinch, zoom and swipe.
Custom CSS: allow leading decimal zeros.
Inline PDFs: Fix height of PDF embeds for greater theme compatability.
Payments Block: prevent hiding block configuration instructions when block is nested.
Shortcode Embeds: correctly handle YouTube URLs that include a start time.
Story Block: improve navigation, fix issues with long press to pause and exiting story on last tap.
Widgets: avoid PHP notice when using the Milestone Widget within the upcoming widget management screen in WordPress 5.8.
WordPress.com API: properly allow requests to upgrade a plugin outside of autoupdates.

Questions?

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

Call for Testing: Jetpack 9.9

Note: This version of Jetpack will only work with WordPress 5.7 and higher.

The beta for Jetpack 9.9 is available now, and the download link is at the top of the beta release notice.

Jetpack 9.9 will be deployed to VIP Go on Thursday, July 8, 2021. 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.

What is being added or changed?

Carousel

The Jetpack carousel module for galleries has been updated for both mobile and desktop experiences. For testing, try:

When viewing the galleries, please test across different web browsers (mobile and desktop)!
In /wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack#/writing make sure the carousel feature is activated.
Create a new post/page with galleries using: Gallery block (wp:gallery), Tiled Gallery block (wp:jetpack/tiled-gallery), and insert a Classic block and use the Add Media toolbar option to create a gallery (a shortcode will be generated).
Add a Gallery widget to one of your site’s widget areas.
On Desktop, make sure the gallery/lightbox functions well. Test leaving comments and viewing the image info (i), also try zoom/pan on the image.
On Mobile, make sure that you are able to swipe between images smoothly, also try double tap to zoom/pan. Also check comments/info.
Check that the gallery you placed in a widget area functions as expected.
In /wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack#/performance toggle “Enable site accelerator / Speed up image load times” (aka Photon). When Photon is enabled, this should provide the best experience for larger dimension images.
In /wp-admin/options-media.php make sure toggling Exif & comment options works as expected. Also try changing the carousel background color and check for any design conflicts.
Try changing themes (perhaps to an older theme) and look for any conflicts.

You’ll want to make sure Carousel works as expected in all scenarios, in different browsers. You can also test things when disabling Jetpack’s Site Accelerator under Jetpack > Settings > Performance.

WordPress 5.8 Compatibility

Note: This version of Jetpack will only work with WordPress 5.7 and higher.

With WordPress 5.8 releasing in July, feel free to install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and test the Jetpack 9.9 Beta alongside WordPress 5.8. Things to check would be:

Jetpack blocks (in the editor and the Full Site Editing interface, such as the site footer).
Jetpack widgets

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.

New Release: Jetpack 9.7

Jetpack 9.7 has been deployed to all VIP sites.

What is being added or changed?

Enhancements

Blocks: improve test coverage for better reliability of each one of Jetpack’s blocks.
Carousel: improve general performance.
Dashboard: add explanation when a feature is unavailable.
Dashboard: improve the display of buttons in the update modal.
Jetpack Videos: add “Play Inline” setting to play a video inline instead of full-screen on mobile devices when enabled.
SEO Tools: improve usability of settings interface.
Widgets: improve message displayed in Blog Stats Widget when there are no stats to display.
WordAds: add Global Privacy Control (GPC) support to CCPA.

Improved compatibility

Blocks: continous work to ensure full compatibility between Jetpack’s Blocks and WordPress’ upcoming Full Site Editing feature.
Featured Content: avoid PHP warnings when terms are fetched without a taxonomy to filter by.
Feature Hints: avoid Fatal errors when other plugins filter the plugin list.
General: improvements to bring multiple features up to WordPress coding standards.
Publicize: update Twitter text processing library to avoid errors when using PHP 8.
Sharing: avoid broken sharing icons when using IE11 and the legacy AMP plugin’s theme.

Bug fixes

Image CDN: correct image URLs in srcset in certain cases.
Markdown: fix regression that broke links with single-quoted href attributes.
Sharing / Publicize: properly encode URLs in Open Graph tags.

For more details about this release (including specific changes), please see the release notes.

Questions?

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

Call for Testing: Jetpack 9.7

The beta for Jetpack 9.7 is available now, and the download link is at the top of the beta release notice.

Note: Jetpack 9.7 requires WordPress 5.6 at a minimum.

Jetpack 9.7 will be deployed to VIP Go on Thursday, May 6, 2021. 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.

What is being added or changed?

Connection Flow

We’ve made several changes to Jetpack’s connection flow in this release.

The first change you’ll find is when browsing your site when Jetpack is active, but not connected to WordPress.com yet. You should see messages inviting you to connect to WordPress.com in 3 new screens:

Appearance > Widgets
Media
The main Posts screen if you’ve published 5 posts or more.

Give those messages a try, and let us know how it goes.

You’ll also want to try connecting your site to WordPress.com in different browsers, while logged in or logged out of your WordPress.com account, and ensure that connection is always possible.

In addition to that, we would recommend that you go through the Jetpack Settings screen after connecting to WordPress.com. Ensure that you can enable all features, apart from those that require a paid plan.

Carousel

We’ve made improvements to the Carousel feature in this release. To test it, try the following:

Go to Jetpack > Settings in your dashboard, and ensure that the Carousel feature is enabled.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page, click on the “Modules” menu item, and ensure the Tiled Galleries feature is enabled in the Module list.
Go to Posts > Add New, and add media to your post in different ways:
- single image block linking to an attachment page
- tiled gallery
- gallery block
- gallery in a classic block
- tiled gallery in a classic block

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.