WordPress 5.9 Development Cycle

Dev Chat Agendas | Dev Chat Summaries | Bug Scrubs Schedule | Dev Notes | Field Guide | All Posts Tagged 5.9

WordPress 5.9 will be the third major release of 2021 and will focus on blocks and intrinsic web design, navigation menus, interface for theme.json, refining editing flows for block themes, additional design tools, and a new default theme. Additionally its possible that the release will also include pattern insertion and creation, unzip/rollback failsafes, PHPUnit tests, and improved compatibility with PHP 8.0 and 8.1.

Release team

Matt Mullenweg is the Release lead, TBD are the Release Coordinators, TBD is the Core Tech Lead, TBD the Editor Tech Lead, Josepha Haden is the Marketing and Communication Lead, Jonathan Bossenger is the Technical Writer Lead, TBD is the Documentation Lead, TBD is the Support Lead, TBD is the Triage Lead, and TBD is the Testing Lead.

All release decisions will ultimately be this release teams’ to make and communicate while gathering input from the community.

Release Schedule

30 June 2021Alpha Begins. Trunk is open for business
3 September 20215.9 Pre-planning post.
12 October 2021
14 October 2021		5.9 Scope / FSE features GO / NO GO.
9 November 2021Feature freeze/Bug Fixes period. During the following two weeks, there will be no commits for new enhancements or feature requests. Core contributors will focus on defect work (aka outstanding bugs).
16 November 2021Beta 1. From this point on, core contributors will focus on testing and fixing bugs discovered during the three weeks of beta testing. Begin writing Dev Notes and the About page (Slack archive, ZIP download).
23 November 2021Beta 2. Test the beta release, fix bugs discovered during beta testing, continue writing Dev Notes and the About page, soft string freeze (Slack archive, ZIP download).
30 November 2021Release candidate 1. Publish the Field Guide with Dev Notes, commit the About page, begin drafting the release post, and hard string freeze (Slack archive, ZIP download).
7 December 2021Release candidate 2. Update the About page images and continue drafting the release post (Slack archive, ZIP download).
13 December 2021Dry run for release of WordPress 5.9 and 24-hour code freeze (Slack archive).
14 December 2021WordPress 5.9 is released (Slack archive, ZIP download)!

How to contribute

To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, and pick a 5.9 ticket. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook.

Get your patches done and submitted as soon as possible, then help find people to test the patches and leave feedback on the ticket. Patches for enhancements will not be committed after the dates posted above so that we can all focus on squashing bugs and deliver the most bug-free WordPress ever 😉

If you want to dive deeper into 5.9, join the weekly meetings in the #core Slack channel, which occur next at Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 08:00 PM UTC.