Teams across the WordPress project are working hard to make sure everything is ready for the upcoming release of WordPress 5.0. Find out what’s going on and how you can get involved.
The Plan for WordPress 5.0
Early this month, the planned release schedule was announced for WordPress 5.0, which was updated a few weeks later. WordPress 5.0 is a highly anticipated release, as it’s the official launch of Gutenberg — the new block editor for WordPress Core. For more detail, check out this granular timeline.
Along with the planned release schedule, @matt, who is heading up this release, announced leads for critical focuses on the project, including @matveb, @karmatosed, @laurelfulford, @allancole, @lonelyvegan, @omarreiss, @antpb, @pento, @chanthaboune, @danielbachhuber, and @mcsf.
WordPress 5.0 is currently in its second beta phase and will soon move to the release candidate status. Help test this release right now by installing the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on your site.
Want to get involved in building WordPress Core? Follow the Core team blog and join the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. You can also help out by testing or translating the release into a local language.
New Editor for WordPress Core
Active development continues on Gutenberg, the new editing experience for WordPress Core. The latest release is feature complete, meaning that all further development on it will be to improve existing features and fix outstanding bugs.
Some have raised concerns about Gutenberg’s accessibility, prompting the development team to detail some areas in which the new editor is accessible. To help improve things further, the team has made a public call for accessibility testers to assist.
Want to get involved in building Gutenberg? Follow the Gutenberg tag on the Core team blog and join the #core-editor channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. Read this guide to find areas where you can have the most impact.
Migrating HelpHub to WordPress.org
HelpHub is an ongoing project to move all of WordPress’ user documentation from the Codex to the WordPress Support portal.
HelpHub has been developed on a separate staging server and it’s now time to migrate the new documentation to its home on WordPress.org. The plan is to have everything moved over before WordPress 5.0 is released, so that all the new documentation will be available on the new platform from the start.
The HelpHub team has published a call for volunteers to help with the migration. If you would like to get involved, join the #docs channel in the Making WordPress Slack group, and contact @atachibana to get started.
A New Default Theme for WordPress
A brand new default theme — Twenty Nineteen — has been announced with development being led by @allancole. The theme is packaged with WordPress 5.0, so it will be following the same release schedule as Core.
The new theme is designed to integrate seamlessly with Gutenberg and showcase how you can build a theme alongside the new block editor and take advantage of the creative freedom that it offers.
Want to help build Twenty Nineteen? Join in on the theme’s GitHub repo and join the #core-themes channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.
Further Reading:
- The Support team are putting together more formal Support Guidelines for the WordPress Support Forums.
- The group focused on privacy tools in Core has released some details on the work they have been doing recently, with a roadmap for their plans over the next few months.
- The Core team released an update about how WordPress will be compatible with PHP 7.3.
- The Theme Review Team have published some new requirements regarding child themes, readme files and trusted authors in the Theme Directory.
- The WordCamp Europe team are working on a PWA service for all WordCamp websites.
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