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 leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release., Jeff Paul and Jonathan Desrosiers are the Release Coordinators, Luke Carbis is the Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Lead, Helen Hou-Sandí is the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. 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 contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org. 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 betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. testing. Begin writing Dev Notesdev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include: a description of the change; the decision that led to this change a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. 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 GuideField guide The field guide is a type of blogpost published on Make/Core during the release candidate phase of the WordPress release cycle. The field guide generally lists all the dev notes published during the beta cycle. This guide is linked in the about page of the corresponding version of WordPress, in the release post and in the HelpHub version page. with Dev Notes, commit the About page, begin drafting the release post, and hard string freeze.
06 July 2021Release 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). 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 TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress., 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 ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker.. 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 bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.-free WordPress ever 😉

If you want to dive deeper into 5.8, join the weekly meetings in the #core 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/. channel, which occur next at Wednesday at 05:00 UTC and Wednesday at 20:00 UTC.