Proposal: 2022 Major Release Timing

Welcome!

The WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:

Found a bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.? Create a ticket in the bug tracker.

Want to contribute? Get started quickly with tickets marked as good first bugs for new contributors or join a bug scrub. There’s more on the reports page, like patches needing testing, and on feature projects page.

Other questions? Here is a detailed handbook for contributors, complete with tutorials.

After our initial discussion about potential release timing for the year, I would like to suggest two additional 2022 releases:

6.0 – Late May
6.1 – Mid October

I believe that the relationship between WP5.9 and WP6.0 will be similar to the relationship between WP5.0 and WP5.1 in that there will be copious user feedback to process so that we can extend, refine, and in some cases even rework the user experience with the vast new feature set introduced in 5.9. By aiming to release WP6.0 in late May, we can let WP5.9 breathe a little, work through the rest of the Phase 2 roadmap, and prioritize WordPress-wide needs as we encounter them.

Given the complexity of our last pair of similar releases, I would love to see some Five for the Future sponsored project manager-ish people* join @jeffpaul and @priethor in addition to our usual release squad. If you’re interested in participating in a squad and want to know more, you can pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” @chanthaboune, @jeffpaul, @priethor or any former release squad member you know!

*So as not to startle anyone or overpromise anything—I’m not suggesting that we need a bunch of people to show up and boss around all of our brave and generous contributors. I’m suggesting that a 19-year-old project can no longer be fully tracked by a person or two and the people who are tracking all of our moving parts could use some support.

#planning

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 11:12 pm on January 27, 2022

I think that will be a lot less stressful for developers who have to update themes/plugins. I like that and appreciate it greatly!

(I’d put my hat in for ‘not on May 27th, because it’s WP/my birthday’ but mostly as am amusing comment and not anything serious 😉 )
swb1 3:42 pm on January 28, 2022

I know it’s never happened before, but based on the described intent, why isn’t the May release 5.10?
- Josepha 5:20 pm on January 28, 2022
  
  I was just talking about that yesterday! I think it just comes down to tradition.
- Jb Audras 12:26 pm on January 31, 2022
  
  Hello,
  5.10 doesn’t exist in WordPress versioning system. We are using MAJOR.MAJOR.MINOR versioning scheme and we can’t (and tbh, dont want/need to) change this easily because it would break the update system (or it would be a massive infrastructure change).
David E. Smith 3:44 pm on January 28, 2022

It probably is a decade too late to ask this, but is there a reason that version numbers always go x.8, x.9. y.0, y.1 instead of x.8, x.9, x.10 (or x.7, y.0)? In general, I’m curious as to why major version number bumps aren’t reserved for major changes. FSE could easily have been a good excuse to skip 5.9 and go straight to 6.0.

Partly it’s a marketing thing, in that you could have made a bigger deal of a new 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.. Partly it’s a managerial-perception thing, in that I’ve already got people in suits and ties asking me how we’re preparing for the major new 6.0 release that’s coming soon, when we know that the delta from 5.9 to 6.0 probably won’t be that dramatic.
- Daniele Scasciafratte 11:46 am on January 29, 2022
  
  I always wondered why not to go to decimals as today there aren’t any difference between a major to another.
  I mean 5.0 it was really a major because of gutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ and this make a difference but between 5.9 and 6.0 what is the real difference?
- Jb Audras 12:27 pm on January 31, 2022
  
  Hello,
  You’re absolutely right: it’s probably a decade too late – the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ update infrastructure is based on MAJOR.MAJOR.MINOR, not on SemVer 🙂
- Robert Anderson 4:02 am on February 1, 2022
  
  I like to think of it as ${ major / 10 }.${ patch } 🙂
Josepha 5:26 pm on January 28, 2022

Yea, the WordPress project doesn’t use semantic versioning, which has been true as long as we’ve been around. That decision was made long before my arrival, so I can’t really give you any insight into why!
Rami Yushuvaev 2:05 pm on February 5, 2022

@chanthaboune you should update the planned releases table in the roadmap page https://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/

Comments are closed.

Welcome!

Communication

Share this: