Hello everyone. Thanks for taking a few moments to join us here. Hope you and your family are well and staying safe. Here is this week’s update on important WordPress news and recommended articles for Outcome Labs WordPress Care Plan customers and our newsletter subscribers. We provide this so you are current on things that may apply to your site or provide opportunities to enhance your site to support your goals. You can see other WordPress-related posts here. If you have any questions, please reach out to us.
The Month in WordPress January 2021
The WordPress core team published its monthly update. This update highlighted information about the key objectives the WordPress core team has for 2021. These are focused on the next phase of the Gutenberg project, Full Site Editing. This will bring significant new capabilities to the WordPress platform. It has significant implications for the entire WordPress community. Outcome Labs is actively involved in testing and providing feedback on this important project.
The WordPress core team also provided updates on the release schedule for WordPress 5.6.1, WordPress 5.7, Gutenberg 9.7, and Gutenberg 9.8. They also highlighted some other features and process areas the core team is working on. You can see the update here.
WordPress 5.6.1 Maintenance Release
The WordPress core team announced the release of WordPress 5.6.1 on February 3, 2021. You can read the announcement here. This maintenance release included 20 bug fixes as well as 7 issues fixed for the block editor. Since these bugs affected WordPress version 5.6, Outcome Labs verified the update and applied it to all sites on an Outcome Labs WordPress Care Plan. If you do not subscribe to one of our plans, we do recommend you update as soon as possible.
WordPress 5.7 Beta 1
The WordPress core team announced the release of the first beta version of WordPress 5.7. Outcome Labs is testing this on our sandbox site. The current target for final release is March 9, 2021. That’s just five weeks away. This release includes a number of enhancements to the Block Editor including new drag and drop capabilities for the Block inserter. The WordPress platform is also being upgraded to simplify the conversion from http to https if you haven’t done that already. You can read the core team announcement and get more details here. The team at WP Tavern also published a good summary.
What’s next in Gutenberg? (February 2021)
WordPress 5.7 will include versions 9.3 to 9.9 of Gutenberg. Outcome Labs has been actively involved with testing and providing feedback as the Gutenberg team has released new features, bug fixes, and other changes. You can get a general overview of current status and plans from the monthly what is next article. The team at WP Tavern does solid overview posts for every release. Here is the one for Gutenberg 9.8. If you would like to “see” the new features without installing the Gutenberg plugin on your staging site (we don’t recommend using it on live sites), we recommend subscribing to Mark Uraine’s Gutenberg Walkthrough on YouTube. We have included the one for Gutenberg 9.8 below. Mark works at Automatic, is a WordPress contributor, and is the co-host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast (which we also highly recommend).
Full-Site Editing Targeted for 5.8 Release in June 2021
This article by Sarah Gooding on WP Tavern was actually published January 25. It is a good overview of the aggressive plan announced by the WordPress core team to ship full site editing in 2021. Here is the introduction to Sarah’s article:
“WordPress core contributors are pushing forward on an ambitious plan to land full-site editing in core before the end of the year. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the open source project’s executive director, published an updated roadmap for 2021 that aims to get an MVP of full-site editing (FSE) in the Gutenberg plugin by April, 2021. FSE v1 would then be on track for shipping with WordPress 5.8, which is anticipated in June, 2021.”
Sarah Gooding, WP Tavern
You can read the rest of the article here. We will be doing some follow up posts specifically on Full Site Editing and perspectives from the WordPress community over the next several weeks. Please watch for more here or subscribe to our RSS feed or social channels to get notified as we publish them.
Upcoming Florida WordPress Meetups
The Tallahassee WordPress Meetup has its next meetup scheduled for Tuesday February 23, 2021 at 6:30 p.m. This will be a virtual session on Google meet. You can get more details and register here.
Several of the Florida WordPress meetup groups have been holding “Mega-Meetups. The next one is scheduled for February 18, 2021 at 6:30 p.m. You can get the details here.
Definitely worth checking out if you have time.
Wrap-up
It was a fairly active week. Let us know any feedback or if there are specific topics you would like us to cover in future posts. If you are on an Outcome Labs Care plan and need anything, please submit a request to the helpdesk so we can follow up.
See something of interest?
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