Francesca Marano 8:33 pm on August 13, 2020
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WordPress 5.6 Release Planning

Kudos to the wonderful group of people who contributed to the successful release of WordPress 5.5 yesterday!  We now turn our focus to the final major releasemajor release A release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope. of the year with WordPress 5.6.

Release Squad

As @chanthaboune noted back in March, WordPress 5.6 will feature an all-women release squad with the hope of increasing the number of women who have experience on a release squad and return as contributors to CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and elsewhere.  Then in May when the 5.5 release squad was announced it also noted many of the 5.6 release squad members who would shadow the 5.5 team and learn the release process.  With @chanthaboune on sabbatical until 21 September 2020, I have the pleasure of sharing the 5.6 release leads and the various cohort groups who will be supporting those leads, as well as the release scope and schedule for 5.6.

Release Scope

The following are the remaining goals for the year that are targeted as part of WordPress 5.6.

  • Complete: Convert the widgets-editing areas complete.
  • Complete: Remove support for PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher 5.6.x.
  • Ship: Navigation menus blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. and screen in Core.
  • Ship: Automatic updates for major WordPress Core releases (opt-in).
  • Ship: New features from the block editor upgrades.
  • Ship: Widgets-editing and CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. support in Core.
  • Ship: Default theme, including an FSE compatible version.
  • Ship: PHP 8 support.
  • Ship: Public 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. of Full Site Editing.

Release Schedule

The schedule from today, 12 August 2020, until the WordPress 5.6 release can be found on the 5.6 development cycle page.  In summary, some key milestones for the release are:

  • Kickoff: 19 August 2020
  • Beta 1: 20 October 2020 (~9 weeks from kickoff)
  • Release Candidaterelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). 1: 17 November 2020 (4 weeks from Beta 1)
  • General Release: 8 December 2020 (3 weeks from Release Candidate 1)

If you want to dive deeper into 5.6, development is discussed at a weekly meeting 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 and occurs next at Wednesday at 20:00 UTC. Wish us luck!

This post was compiled with the help of @jeffpaul and reviewed for clarity and accuracy by @cbringmann.  Props to @cbringmann, @angelasjin, @francina, and @desrosj for helping assemble this fantastic release squad and to @chanthaboune for the inspiration to lead the project in this direction!

#5-6, #planning