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WordPress 5.4 is shaping up to be the best WordPress 2020 has seen!
As a user, you’ll see new blocks and enhancements in the block editor, new embeds, and improvements in the WordPress Admin experience.
As a developer, you’ll see 122 enhancements and feature requests, 210 bug fixes, and more! Of course, all those improvements mean code changes, which could in turn require you to make updates to your site, plugin, or theme.
So take a look through this Field Guide, and see what’s relevant to you and your users, among the many improvements coming in 5.4…
Accessibility
On the 14 updates related to Accessibility in 5.4, you’ll want to particularly note changes to the WordPress Admin Bar, to the calendar and recent comments widgets, on the Menu screen, and bugs reported by the WPCampus accessibility report.
Block Editor
The block editor has continued its rapid iteration since WordPress 5.0. Now it has Gutenberg version 7.5 bundled with WordPress 5.4; that’s ten releases all bundled into WordPress 5.4 (versions 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 and 7.5)! Bug fixes and performance improvements from Gutenberg versions 7.6 will also be part of 5.4.
The WordPress 5.4 Beta 1 post highlights a lot of new features and improvements across these releases, though you’ll also want to note the impressive achievement of 14% loading-time reduction and 51% time-to-type reduction (for a particularly long post of ~36,000 words, ~1,000 blocks) since WordPress 5.3.
Below you’ll find details on two new blocks, button component updates, block collections, default fullscreen mode for new installs/devices, custom keyboard shortcuts, general block editor API updates, new block variations API, a new gradient theme API, markup and style-related changes, and a new @wordpress/create-block package for block scaffolding.
On the 14 updates of the Customizer component, WordPress 5.4 improves accessibility of focused elements as a follow-up to WordPress 5.3 Admin CSS changes, adds documentation of existing Customizer functions and hooks, removes apple-touch-icon-precomposed deprecated meta tags, and improves Menu items selection logic.
Please note that some unused Customizer classes are now formally deprecated:
On the 5 updates in the Menus component, WordPress 5.4 improves keyboard accessibility of the Menu items selection tab panel and streamlines the user interface.
If your plugins add custom fields to menu items, you’ll want to update your code to use the new wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields hook:
On the 22 updates related to the REST API, WordPress 5.4 now supports “OR” taxonomy relation parameter in Post Controller, adds selective link embedding and introduces some changes in the WP_REST_Server method. Read below for more details on these updates:
On the 3 updates to the Shortcodes component, WordPress 5.4 introduces documentation improvements and a new function: apply_shortcodes. This function is an alias of do_shortcode, which is still supported.
On the 9 updates to the Widgets component, WordPress 5.4 introduces accessibility and user interface enhancements on the Widgets Admin screen and changes in the Recent Comments and Calendar Widgets HTML markup.
There are even more goodies in 5.4, like the new wp-env (a zero config tool for painless local WordPress environments), enhancements to favicon handling, better information about errors in wp_login_failed, a new site ID in multisite’s newblog_notify_siteadmin filter, a new TikTok video embed and removal of the CollegeHumor embed, storing the original URL of media attachments in _source_url post meta, improved accessibility by loading the Admin Bar with wp_body_open, avoiding duplicate IDs in the Recent Comments widget, a new parameter in the lostpassword_post action in retrieve_password(), theme headers supporting “Requires at least” and “Requires PHP” declarations, and the delete_posts capability won’t trigger PHP notices for custom post types. Read through the dev notes below to see details on all these changes coming in 5.4.
Over 198 bugs, 121 enhancements and feature requests, and 8 blessed tasks have been marked as fixed in WordPress 5.4. Some additional ones to highlight include:
Bootstrap/Load: Enhancement to favicon handling (#47398)
Bundled Theme: Twenty Twenty: Add social icon for WhatsApp (#49098)
Comments: Add “In response to …” before threaded comments in comment feed (#43429)
Now that 5.4 has been officially kicked off, bug scrubs will happen weekly all the way up to the final release. Keep an eye on this schedule – it will change often to reflect the latest information.
These scrubs are separate and in addition to the normal scrubbing and triage by individual components. Some of those sessions include:
Design Triage: Every Monday 17:30 UTC at #design Gutenberg Design Triage: Every Tuesday 17:00 UTC at #design Accessibility Scrub: Every Friday 14:00 UTC at #accessibility
Also, the ongoing APAC-friendly #core bug scrub session every Thursday at 06:00 UTC will continue during the cycle, alternating focus between core and editor.
Next, the Accessibility team has announced a few extra scrubs for the 5.4 cycle. You can read about those here.
Finally, a reminder that anyone — Yes, you! — can host a bug scrub at anytime. You can work through any tickets you’re comfortable with. In fact, if you plan one that’s 5.4-focused, we’ll add it to the schedule here along with your name. Finally, you’ll get well deserved props in the weekly Dev Chat, as well as in the #props Slack channel!
All open tickets for 5.4, in order of priority, can be found here. Tickets that haven’t seen any love in a while are in particular need. Those can be found in this query.
If you’d like to lead a bug scrub or have any questions or concerns about the schedule, please leave a comment or reach out to me directly.
The current major is 5.4; please keep testing for all the bugs. At the same time, trunk has branched to 5.5 as of RC1. That means 5.5 is officially in alpha.
Final release is March 31.
Components Check-in
News from components
Components that need help
Cross-component collaboration
Open Floor
Got something to propose for the agenda, or a specific item relevant to our standard list above?
Please leave a comment, and say whether or not you’ll be in the chat, so the group can either give you the floor or bring up your topic for you, accordingly.
This meeting happens in the #core channel. To join the meeting, you’ll need an account on the Making WordPress Slack.
Remove update time text after manual update – PR 43
Ensure “Automatic Updates” column is not added if no content would be output in the column – PR 57
Specific messages for delayed or disabled cron events – PR 58
Prevent mis-match between count in Auto-updates Enabled view and the number of plugins displayed for that view by applying ‘all_plugins’ filter before computing that count. – PR 59
Thanks @pbiron for his invaluable help on version 0.3.
@audrasjb shared a screenshot with an example of email notification:
Please feel free to propose string changes to this first implementation of email notifications.
Version 0.4.0 will focus on backporting every auto-updates features to Themes.@audrasjb to merge this pull request as a first step for the work on themes support. Then, the idea is to open pull requests for each function/feature to be backported, so it’s easier to track progress on themes support.
@bookdude13 asked whether it’s better to open up issues to break up the work on the themes port, or to directly address them with pull requests.
@audrasjb will open an issue to list all the functions/feature that need proper backport and to track the team’s progression.
There is also a few background tasks opened by @jeffpaul concerning the GitHub repository.
Concerning Email notifications, @joostdevalk proposed to add links to the plugins changelog in those emails. @pbiron answered that it might be hard for plugins/themes not in the WordPress.org repo. @joostdevalk proposed to make it filterable. @audrasjb proposed to make the notification entirely filterable. @joostdevalk felt concerned about plugins that would override the email even when multiple plugins are updated at once.
@afragen proposed to use a filter that could be specific for each, like for example: apply_filters( 'wp_autoupdates_email', $text, $slug )
This item will be discussed again during the next team meeting.
@pbiron wanted to discuss a specific pull request. It proposes to add filters to control whether the Enable/Disable buttons appear in the UI for a given plugin. @pbiron and @audrasjb agreed that having a filter that is specific to the UI is not the way to go and it is to be filterable then the existing auto_update_plugin hook should be used. For now, the pull request will stay open for further discussion.
Next meeting is planned on Tuesday March 24, 2020 at 18:00 UTC and will take place on #core-auto-updates Slack channel.
@since x.x.x: Should always be 3-digit (e.g. @since 3.6.0).
This is in contrast to the PHP documentation standards, which include guidelines around using @since as a changelog:
If significant changes have been made to a function, hook, class, or method, additional @since tags, versions, and descriptions should be added to provide a changelog for that function.
Proposal: Incorporate some adaptation of the PHP since changelog guidelines into the JavaScript inline documentation standards.
Discussion Points:
@nerrad asks if this could be used to pull documentation automatically from the source code. This is quite possible, and is likely exactly what is done with the PHP source code documentation (example documentation and source).
Action Items:
Update the JS documentation standards, assuming there is no opposition presented in the coming days.
Disable the JSDoc since format validation for Gutenberg in the related changelog (already done)
News Roundup
This roundup contains a few links for Gutenberg and JavaScript related news curated (and commented on) by @nerrad.
Gutenberg 7.7 was released (and shortly thereafter 7.7.1). Highlights in this release are: the new block ui (otherwise known as “G2”) and the initial version of the block patterns ui.
Outside of normal Gutenberg and JS news, but I thought it worth highlighting – All-women release squad. I’m so excited about this!
If you have anything to share for the Task Coordination section, please leave it as a comment on this post. If you have anything to propose for the agenda or other specific items related to those listed above, please leave a comment below.
