WordPress 5.1 Beta 3 Delay

WordPress 5.1 BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 3 was scheduled to be released today. It is now delayed by one day, and will be released after the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. dev chat.

There are recent reports of potential security issues in the new PHP error recovery feature. To address these issues, there’s a promising patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. on #46130, but it’s a significant change in behaviour to be committing this late in the release cycle. Ideally, this large a change would’ve been made before Beta 1.

There are a few options to move forward on this:

  • Continue with the fix in #46130, focussing on ensuring it doesn’t expose new potential security issues.
  • Disable the feature by default, adding a feature flag for sites to opt-in to error recovery.
  • Revert the feature from trunk, and aim to include it in WordPress 5.2, instead.

An earlier discussion in #core generally leaned towards reverting it.

Reverting the error recovery feature will not have an effect upon the PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher upgrade notices feature. Both the PHP upgrade notices and the error recovery are part of the broader Site Health project, but are functionally independent of each other.

Delaying the Beta 3 release by a day ensures that everyone involved has the opportunity to discuss the next steps.

#5-1