This is the summary of the meeting in #hosting-community on Slack Wednesday, October 23, 2019, at 1700 UTC (Slack archive).
Attendees: @jadonn @brettface @duchesscorp @azaozz @amykamala
WordPress 5.3 Release Candidate is Out
WordPress 5.3 is set to release on November 12th, 2019. Release Candidate 2 is out now, is available for testing and offers many new changes.
WordPress 5.3 Highlights
- The native PHP JSON extension is required for upgrading to WordPress 5.3. WordPress will not update to 5.3 if it cannot detect that extension. The core team has a blog post with more detailed information.
@jadonn mentioned that “Requiring the JSON extension will allow the core team to remove a number of workarounds, polyfills, and other bits of code that tried to accommodate PHP installations that did not have the JSON extension. In relation to this, JSON is already one of the PHP extensions we have listed on the #hosting-community team handbook’s list of PHP extensions.
- Some changes in 5.3 are aimed at improving the Site Health page. The Site Health page will report
Should be improvedorGoodfor the various tested items rather than display numeric scores. Additionally, Site Health’s recovery emails will now contain debug information. Core team has provided more details on that here. - There are numerous changes to media uploads and handling with 5.3. 5.3 automatically retries uploads and if that fails, serves informative errors instead of an
http error. - WordPress 5.3 will introduce a number of CSS changes in WordPress admin, as well. You can see dev notes here.
- In 5.3 a new admin email verification screen is introduced, that will be displayed once every six months for users to confirm their email addresses. The admin login page will have a “Show” button next to the password field for displaying the password.
- Find out more about whats new in 5.3 here!
Daylight Savings Time
Daylight Savings time in the U.S. ends November 3rd. Should the #hosting-community meeting time be adjusted to accommodate the change? Feel free to comment here!
Open Floor
@azaozz requested help testing image post-processing changes in 5.3, mentioning that you “may need to tweak the test server’s php.ini (if possible) to make it timeout or go out of memory. More info here.
Anyone can get started with testing by installing the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. Or, you can download the release candidate directly.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be in #hosting-community on Monday, October 28, 2019 at 1400 UTC. Hope to see you then!