WordPress 5.8 Development Cycle

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WordPress 5.8 will be the second major release of 2021.

Release team

Matt Mullenweg is the Release lead, Jeff Paul and Jonathan Desrosiers are the Release Coordinators, Luke Carbis is the Triage Lead, Helen Hou-Sandí is the Core Tech Lead, Riad Benguella the Editor Tech Lead, Josepha Haden-Chomphosy is the Marketing and Communication Lead, Milana Cap the Documentation Lead, Mary Job the Support Lead and Piotrek Boniu the Testing Lead.

All release decisions will ultimately be this release teams’ to make and communicate while gathering input from the community. There will not be a new bundled theme included in 5.8.

Release Schedule

23 February 2021Alpha Begins. Trunk is open for business
30 March 20215.8 Pre-planning post
25 May 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)
8 June 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.
15 June 2021Beta 2. Test the beta release, fix bugs discovered during beta testing, continue writing Dev Notes and the About page.
22 June 2021Beta 3. Test the beta release, fix bugs discovered during beta testing, continue writing Dev Notes and the About page, soft string freeze.
24 25 June 2021Beta 4. Test the beta release, fix bugs discovered during beta testing, continue writing Dev Notes and the About page. Note: This beta was not part of the original schedule and was added after beta 3.
29 June 2021Release candidate 1. Publish the Field Guide with Dev Notes, commit the About page, begin drafting the release post, and hard string freeze.
06 July 2021Release candidate 2 Update the About page images and continue drafting the release post.
13 July 2021Release candidate 3. Finalize the About page and the release post.
19 July 2021Dry run for release of WordPress 5.8 and 24-hour code freeze
20 July 2021WordPress 5.8 general release date

How to contribute

To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, and pick a 5.8 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 5.8, join the weekly meetings in the #core Slack channel, which occur next at Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at 05:00 AM UTC and Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at 08:00 PM UTC.