Gary Pendergast 1:12 am on February 21, 2019
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WordPress 5.1 Release Day

We’re less than 24 hours away from WordPress 5.1! If you’d like to help get this release out the door, here’s how you can join in.

The current plan is to start the release process at February 21th, 2019 at 22:00 UTC, in the #core SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel.

The major version release process can take a bit more time than the betas or Release Candidates, particularly if we run into any last minute issues that need to be addressed.

The Release Process

We’ll be working through the Major Version Release process, for anyone who wants to follow along.

I ran through the Dry Run steps earlier, there was one file missing from $_old_files (#46284).

How You Can Help

A key part of the release process is checking that the zip packages work on all the different server configurations available. If you have some of the less commonly used servers available for testing (IIS, in particular), that’d be super helpful. Servers running older versions of PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher and MySQLMySQL MySQL is a relational database management system. A database is a structured collection of data where content, configuration and other options are stored. https://www.mysql.com/. will also need testing.

In particular, please test:

  • Does a new WordPress install work correctly? This includes running through the manual install process, as well as WP-CLIWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ or one-click installers.
  • Does it upgrade correctly? Are the files listed in $_old_files removed when you upgrade?
  • Does Multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site upgrade properly?
  • Run through some basic usage flows, both on desktop and mobile:
    • Publish a post, including a variety of different blocks.
    • Comment on the post.
    • Install a new pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party/theme, or upgrade an existing one.
    • Change the site language.
    • If you’re a plugin developer, or if there are complex plugins you depend upon, test that they’re working correctly.

You can even start this early, by running the WordPress 5.1 RC2 packages, which are built using the same method as the final packages.

#5-1