Jonathan Desrosiers 5:35 pm on May 17, 2018
Tags: 4.9.6 ( 22 ), field guide ( 15 )

4.9.6 Update Guide

Included in WordPress 4.9.6 are several new functions and tools that you should be aware of. Here is a brief breakdown of resources to help you become acquainted with WordPress 4.9.6.

Attention: Theme Authors

4.9.6 adds several new privacy related features, one of which may require a small styling adjustment. These are detailed in the following dev note.

Changes that Affect Theme Authors in WordPress 4.9.6

Privacy

WordPress 4.9.6 introduces some new tools related to data privacy. This includes a tool for users to request an export of all the stored data associated with them on the site. It also includes a tool for users to request erasure of that same data. Both tools include admin workflows to fulfill those requests.

To help plugin and theme authors integrate with these new tools, several new pages in the Handbook have been created.

Suggesting text for the site privacy policy

Adding the Personal Data Exporter to Your Plugin

Adding the Personal Data Eraser to Your Plugin

Privacy Related Options, Hooks and Capabilities

New PHP Polyfills

To help WordPress Core, plugins, and themes with forward compatibility, a polyfill for each of these functions has been added in 4.9.6. When a site is not running a version of PHP that includes these functions, WordPress will automatically load these polyfills.

New PHP Polyfills in 4.9.6

TinyMCE Update

TinyMCE has been updated from version 4.6.7 to version 4.7.11. This update provides a large number of bug fixes. For more information, see #43862.

A full list of bugs and enhancements in 4.9.6 can be found on Trac.

#4-9-6, #field-guide

clane_workforce 1:45 pm on May 18, 2018

Hello,

What if my Privacy Policy Page is on my main website, this is a subdomain of the main website. The new Privacy Settings > Privacy Policy page selection doesn’t provide a way to use a link to a page on another website, only to create a new page or link to an internal page. What if I have many other company websites that are owned by one main corporation that has one central Privacy Policy page? I look forward to your help. Thank you.
- Jonathan Desrosiers 7:48 pm on May 18, 2018
  
  By default on multisite, only super admins are allowed to configure privacy policies unless a plugin or theme remaps the capabilities to create/edit a privacy policy (#43935).
  
  If one privacy policy is desired for all sites on a multisite instance, then the `privacy_policy_url ` filter could be used to return that URL for any site on the install (https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/43935#comment:6).
  
  For more information on currently proposed multisite related functionality, see #43821, #43822, #43738.
Paul Gilzow 8:06 pm on May 18, 2018

Will 4.9.6 eventually be pushed out as an update vs upgrade (i.e. sites set to update for maintenance releases will see this as an update and automatically apply)?
- Ian Dunn 8:54 pm on May 18, 2018
  
  A somewhat severe bug was discovered, and the Core team is currently deciding how to address it. It only affects a small number of sites with a specific combination of plugins, but it’s fairly severe for the sites that are affected.
  
  https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44142
  
  There’s been some discussion in Slack about keeping auto-updates off for 4.9.6, and then releasing 4.9.7 next week with a fix. It’s still up in the air, though.
Mike Little 6:00 pm on May 19, 2018

Above it says: “This includes a tool for users to request an export of all the stored data associated with them on the site. It also includes a tool for users to request erasure of that same data.” Where are these tools? I can see the admin side of it, but what does a user see and use?
- t-p 7:15 pm on May 20, 2018
  
  Good question!
- Jonathan Desrosiers 12:59 pm on May 21, 2018
  
  This is something being explored in #44013. It was not opened in time to be considered for 4.9.6, though.
  
  It is my understanding that contact information should be listed in their privacy policy. This is a good place to mention how to submit a request. For some sites, a form may not be the desired way. There could be a specific email address (such as privacy@domain.com) for these requests.
  
  There are several plugins (such as https://wordpress.org/plugins/gdpr-data-request-form/) that are stepping up to provide this functionality.
Kathi Keinstein 6:45 am on May 21, 2018

After updating my WordPress blog to 4.9.6 the visitor statistics tracked by Google Analytics als well as by Piwik/Matomo used by Blogfoster collapsed to very low values within a few days. Does the update do anything (concerning data privacy?) which might affect tracking visitors (perhaps I missed to adjust a new setting…?)?
- Jonathan Desrosiers 12:43 pm on May 21, 2018
  
  I recommend posting this in the support forums, as that is a better location for a question like this. But initially, this does not seem that this would be caused by 4.9.6.
  
  Forums: https://wordpress.org/support/
Carine Pic 12:54 pm on May 21, 2018

Thanks for the new handy tools and settings about privacy and GDPR compliancy. These would be quite useful if they weren’t hidden under menus that only a user with the admin role can see. We have 20+ websites that we’re maintaining/updating for our clients, so we have the admin access, but our clients don’t – they only have an editor account, so they can’t break the site or theme by doing something they shouldn’t in the settings. However we certainly don’t want to deal with their privacy settings and tools, like erasing personal data or dealing with data requests, and currently there’s no way to make these tools available for editor accounts. If you give them the “manage_options” capability, it’s basically the same thing as making them administrators, so this isn’t an option. Is there any chance that this will change in future releases?
- Jonathan Desrosiers 1:33 pm on May 21, 2018
  
  `manage_options` does not actually control who has access to these tools. WordPress 4.9.6 introduced three new capabilities for control: `erase_others_personal_data`, `export_others_personal_data`, and `manage_privacy_options`. These are the capabilities that control who can access the new privacy tools and manage the site’s privacy policy.
  
  These were purposefully only added to administrators by default.
  
  You can find more information about these new capabilities on the Privacy Related Options, Hooks, and Capabilities page in the Plugin Handbook.
  - Carine Pic 1:44 pm on May 21, 2018
    
    Thanks for your answer, that’s great then if they have specific capabilities! I might be missing something though, I can’t find these capabilities in the list (I’m using the plugin User Role Editor), and if I try to add them manually and assign them to a role, it does nothing at all (the user still can’t see the menu links in Tools).
    - Jonathan Desrosiers 2:33 pm on May 21, 2018
      
      I actually misspoke! I investigated and the capabilities are mapped onto `manage_options` after all. I can see how this could be undesirable, so I opened #44176 to discuss.
      - Carine Pic 2:38 pm on May 21, 2018
        
        Cool! Thanks a lot for having taken the time to investigate this. I’ll watch the ticket and hopefully this can be changed in a future release.
cheryl2017 2:05 am on May 22, 2018

anyone have this problem?

Since the update today the images in my Media Library don’t show the image just an X but they are working most everywhere else. I thought you might
like to know in case someone else is having the same problem.

So basically if I go to the library to change, add or even upload a new picture just get the x and no picture.
William Teach 2:56 pm on May 24, 2018

I’m unable to update on two different sites, https://www.thepiratescove.us and ncdevil.com/pc. I get

Download failed.: The checksum of the file (b5238626f66428b39eec15abdbf9fd9f) does not match the expected checksum value (5601580296bc0122084df3f965490112).

Installation Failed

And several plugins, including Jetpack, WP Super Cache, WPtouch Mobile Plugin, and a few others get the error “Update Failed: The package could not be installed. PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature”

Never seen this happen with WP.
lemasde1 2:43 pm on June 1, 2018

Since my site was automatically updated to wordpress 4.9.6 all my internal links have vanished. It is a real estate site and if you click on a property for more details or to the next page you get ‘Page not found’. I use the Agenta theme as I am no techie and now nothing works. How to fix this?
swearingdad 8:22 am on June 22, 2018

For many of my sites even if I select a page for the “Privacy Policy Page” in the “Settings” > ” “Privacy Settings” I still cannot get rid to he orange badge alert next to “Privacy” in the admin menu. How do I stop this notification?