The third Release Candidate (RC3) for WordPress 5.9 is here!

Thank you to everyone who has contributed thus far toward testing and filing bugs to help make WordPress 5.9 a great release. WordPress 5.9 is slated to land in just one week—on January 25, 2022. You still have time to help! Since RC2 arrived last week, testers have found and fixed two bugs, 14 fixes from Gutenberg. There has been one additional Gutenberg fix today.

Testing the release

You can test the WordPress 5.9 release candidate in three ways:

Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).

Option 2: Download the beta version here (zip).

Option 3: When using WP-CLI to upgrade from Beta 1, 2, 3, 4, RC1, or RC2 on a case-insensitive filesystem, please use the following command sequence:

Command One:

wp core update --version=5.9-RC3

Command Two:

wp core update --version=5.9-RC3 --force

Your help to test the third Release Candidate is vital: the more testing that happens, the more stable the release, and the better the experience for users, developers, and the WordPress community.

Thank you to all contributors who tested the RC2 release and gave feedback. Testing for bugs is a critical part of polishing every release and is a great way to contribute to WordPress.

How to help

Help test WordPress 5.9 features – this post provides a guide to set up your testing environment, a list of testable features, and information about how to submit feedback you find as you go.

Skilled in languages other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages! Thanks to every locale that is working on translations.

Developers and those interested in more background to the features can find more in the Field Guide. You can also follow the 5.9 development cycle and timeline.

If you have found a bug, you can post the details to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums.

If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also check the issue against a list of known bugs.

For their help in compiling this post, props to @cbringmann, @webcommsat, @psykro,@marybaum, @chanthaboune, @davidbaumwald, and @hellofromtonya.