WordPress 5.9.x release team and 5.9.1 schedule

The 5.9.x releases will follow the same consistent minor release leads strategy as the 5.8.x releases did.

For all the 5.9.x point releases, the release leads will be:

• Release LeadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. / CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. tech: @audrasjb
• Release Deputy / Editor tech: @mamaduka

5.9.1 proposed schedule

The following schedule is being proposed for 5.9.1:

• 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).: Thursday, February 17, 2022
• Final release: Tuesday, February 22, 2022

@sergeybiryukov will run mission control for this release.

TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets update

As of the publish date of this post, 21 Trac tickets have already been fixed and backported to the 5.9 branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". to be included in 5.9.1, and 3 more have already been fixed and are waiting for proper backportbackport A port is when code from one branch (or trunk) is merged into another branch or trunk. Some changes in WordPress point releases are the result of backporting code from trunk to the release branch.. 18 additional open tickets are currently in the 5.9.1 milestone for consideration.

GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issues updates

As of the publish date of this post, there are 50+ pull request labelled for backporting to the 5.9 branch.

Release coordination

During the 5.9 release, a new, #5-9-release-leads channel was created in 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/. for the release squad to have all 5.9 related conversations. Because the 5.9.x releases are part of 5.9 by extension, all coordination and conversation related to the 5.9.x releases will also be held here before the channel is archived when WordPress 6.0 is released.

Thanks @hellofromtonya and @mamaduka for peer review.

#5-9, #5-9-1