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WordPress 5.6 “Simone”

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Meet Simone, our latest and greatest WordPress release. Named for the legendary performer Nina Simone, who is known for tunes like “Feeling Good”, “Young, Gifted and Black”, and “Four Women”. Fire up a playlist with her best work and read on to discover what we have in store for you.

WordPress 5.6 Simone with a photo of Nina Simone

Welcome to WordPress 5.6

Sharing your stories has never been easier.

WordPress 5.6 brings you countless ways to set your ideas free and bring them to life. With a brand-new default theme as your canvas, it supports an ever-growing collection of blocks as your brushes. Paint with words. Pictures. Sound. Or rich embedded media.

colored circles

Greater layout flexibility

Bring your stories to life with more tools that let you edit your layout with or without code. Single column blocks, designs using mixed widths and columns, full-width headers, and gradients in your cover block—make small changes or big statements with equal ease!

More block patterns

In some themes, preconfigured block patterns make setting up standard pages on your site a breeze. Let the power of patterns streamline your workflow and save you clicks. Plus, share these features with clients, editors, and more.

Better video captioning

To help you add subtitles or captions to your videos, you can now upload them within your post or page. This makes it easier than ever to make your videos accessible for anyone who needs or prefers to use subtitles.

black vertical line

Twenty Twenty-One is here!

Examples of block patterns available in Twenty Twenty-One.

Twenty Twenty-One is a blank canvas for your ideas, and the block editor is the best brush. It is built for the block editor and packed with brand-new block patterns you can only get in the default themes. Try different layouts in a matter of seconds, and let the theme’s eye-catching, yet timeless design make your work shine. 

What’s more, this default theme puts accessibility at the heart of your website. It conforms to the WordPress accessibility-ready guidelines and addresses several more specialized standards from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AAA. It will help you meet the highest level of international accessibility standards when you create accessible content and choose plugins which are accessible too!

A rainbow of soft pastels

A mobile screenshot of each included color palette in Twenty Twenty-One, going in ROYGBIV order.

Perfect for a new year, Twenty Twenty-One gives you a range of pre-selected color palettes in pastel, all of which conform to AAA standards for contrast. You can also choose your own background color for the theme, and the theme chooses accessibility-conscious text colors for you — automatically!

Need more flexibility than that? You can also choose your own color palette from the color picker.

colored circles

Improvements for everyone

Expanding auto-updates

For years, only developers have been able to update WordPress automatically. But now you have that option, right in your dashboard. If this is your first site, you have auto-updates ready to go, right now! Upgrading an existing site? No problem! Everything is the same as it was before.

Accessibility Statement 

Even if you’re not an expert, you can start letting others know about your site’s commitment to accessibility! The new feature plugin includes template copy for you to edit and publish, and it’s written to support different contexts and jurisdictions.  

Built-in Patterns

If you’ve not had the chance to play with block patterns yet, all default themes now feature a range of block patterns that let you master complex layouts with minimal effort. Customize the patterns to your liking with the copy, images, and colors that fit your story or brand. 

colored and textured rectangles

For developers

REST API authentication with Application Passwords

Thanks to the API’s new Application Passwords authorization feature, third-party apps can connect to your site seamlessly and securely. This new REST API feature lets you see what apps are connecting to your site and control what they do. 

More PHP 8 support

5.6 marks the first steps toward WordPress Core support for PHP 8. Now is a great time to start planning how your WordPress products, services, and sites can support the latest PHP version. For more information about what to expect next, read the PHP 8 developer note.

jQuery

Updates to jQuery in WordPress take place across three releases 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7. As we reach the mid-point of this process, run the update test plugin to check your sites for errors ahead of time.    

If you find issues with the way your site looks ( e.g. a slider doesn’t work, a button is stuck — that sort of thing), install the jQuery Migrate plugin.

Check out the Field Guide

Read about the latest version of WordPress in this guide. It highlights developer notes for each change in the release. 

It’s a new day, it’s a new life for me….and I’m feeling good.

~Nina Simone

Reposted from WordPress.org

WooCommerce 4.8 is now available!

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We’re excited to announce that WooCommerce 4.8 is now publicly available! It has been in development since November 2020 and Core contributions include about 257 commits from 29 contributors!

This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with the previous version.

Given the release of PHP8, WordPress 5.6, and the Twenty Twenty-One theme, the focus of this release is on compatibility and quality of life improvements.

As always, we recommend creating a backup of your site and making sure that themes and plugins are compatible before updating. You can check out this update guide for more information.

What’s new in 4.8?

Variations Report

Example of the variation report

This new report grants merchants insight into the sales of individual product variations. (#5167)

Homescreen Layouts

Merchants may now choose between two different layouts for the homescreen. (#5429)

Notable Fixes & Improvements

There are many fixes and stability improvements in this release:

  • Limited the status page’s warning for untested extensions to major releases. (#28114)
  • Added support for the Twenty Twenty-One theme. (#28134)
  • Reduced the memory usage of AJAX product search. (#28177)
  • Added shipping, tax, and fee lines to refund REST API responses. (#28241)

You can find the complete changelog for this release in the changelog.txt file.

Database Changes

This release does not introduce any changes to the database.

Template Changes

This release does not introduce any changes to template files.

Filters and actions

We have added one new filter:

FiltersDescription
woocommerce_product_has_optionsDetermine if the product has options for the user to configure.

WooCommerce 4.7.1 Fix Release

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This release introduces several small compatibility improvements and fixes for taxonomy templates changed in WooCommerce 4.7. Also, based on user feedback, we decided to introduce a fix to prevent variations without attributes from being added to the cart that was originally planned for 4.8.0.

Here is the WooCommerce 4.7.1 changelog:

  • Prevent variable product to be added to cart until a valid variation is selected first. #28103
  • Restored support for custom taxonomy-product_cat-<SLUG>.php and taxonomy-product_tag-<SLUG>.php templates. #28377
  • Display overrides of taxonomy-product_<cat|tag>.php and content-product_cat.php templates in Status page. #28378
  • Apply woocommerce_cart_needs_payment filter in WC_Checkout::process_checkout() to make backwards compatible. #28281

Thanks to everyone for reporting these issues promptly and helping out with the fix release.

You can download the latest release of WooCommerce here or visit Dashboard → Updates to update the plugin from your WordPress admin screen.

WooCommerce 4.7 is now available!

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We are excited to announce that WooCommerce 4.7 is now publicly available! It has been in development since October 2020 and has been updated with 393 commits from 22 contributors.

This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with the previous version.

Black Friday is coming up and we’re keeping this release small, focusing on stability and compatibility, with most of the updates being fixes.

As always, we recommend creating a backup of your site and making sure that themes and plugins are compatible before updating. You can check out this update guide for more information.

What’s new in 4.7?

The WooCommerce 4.7 release contains updated versions of WooCommerce Admin (1.6.3) and WooCommerce Blocks (3.5.0 & 3.6.0), fixes, and localization improvements.

Notable fixes and improvements

  1. Updated product_cat/tag taxonomy template file names to product-cat, and product-tag. (#27736).
  2. Excluded draft pages from the “Shop page” setting. (#27890).

You can review the complete changelog for this release on the changelog.txt file.

Filters and actions

We have added one new filter:

FiltersDescription
woocommerce_should_send_low_stock_notificationDetermine if the current product should trigger a low stock notification..

Database changes

This release does not introduce any changes to the database.

Template changes

Several files were added or updated in this release, including:

FileDescription
content-product-cat.phpNew file introduced by #27736 to replace content-product_cat.php
taxonomy-product-cat.phpNew file introduced by #27736 to replace taxonomy-product_cat.php
taxonomy-product-tag.phpNew file introduced by #27736 to replace taxonomy-product_tag.php

Note that content-product_cat.php, taxonomy-product_cat.php, and taxonomy-product_tag.php are still supported by WooCommerce.

WooCommerce 4.6.2 Fix Release

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This release fixes a bug discovered recently that allows anonymous users to create an account during checkout even when the “Allow customers to create an account during checkout” setting is disabled. The fix to this bug can be found here.

We found this problem while investigating reports of a bot that is creating spam orders in some WooCommerce stores. We will publish another post with more information detailing what we know about the actions of this bot and how it is using the bug that is fixed in this release later today.

The gist of it is that the bot is able to create a user when placing an order exploiting the bug fixed by 4.6.2. After creating the user, the bot tries to find vulnerabilities in other plugins installed on the site that require an unprivileged authenticated account. Updating to WooCommerce 4.6.2 will stop the bot from creating a user account when the “Allow customers to create an account during checkout” setting is disabled, but it won’t stop it from creating orders. Removing user accounts created by the bot is recommended.

Here is the WooCommerce 4.6.2 changelog:

  • Prevent checkout from creating accounts when the related setting is disabled.

Thanks to everyone for reporting this issue promptly and helping out with the fix release.

You can download the latest release of WooCommerce here or visit Dashboard → Updates to update the plugin from your WordPress admin screen.

WordPress 5.5.3 Maintenance Release

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WordPress 5.5.3 is now available. 

This maintenance release fixes an issue introduced in WordPress 5.5.2 which makes it impossible to install WordPress on a brand new website that does not have a database connection configured. This release does not affect sites where a database connection is already configured, for example, via one-click installers or an existing wp-config.php file.

5.5.3-alpha Issue

Earlier today — between approximately 15:30 and 16:00 UTC — the auto-update system for WordPress updated some sites from version 5.5.2 to version 5.5.3-alpha. This auto-update was due to an error in the Updates API caused by the 5.5.3 release preparations (see more here). The 5.5.3-alpha version at this point was functionally identical to 5.5.2 as no development work had been started on 5.5.3; however, the following changes may have been made to your site:

  • The default “Twenty” themes installed as part of the pre-release package.
  • The “Akismet” plugin installed as part of the pre-release package.

These themes and plugins were not activated and therefore remain non-functional unless you installed them previously. It is safe to delete these features should you prefer not to use them. 

If you are not on 5.5.2, or have auto-updates for minor releases disabled, please manually update to the 5.5.3 version by downloading WordPress 5.5.3 or visiting Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now.”

For more technical details of the issue, we’ve posted on our Core Development blog.

WordPress 5.5.2 Security and Maintenance Release

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WordPress 5.5.2 is now available!

This security and maintenance release features 14 bug fixes in addition to 10 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

WordPress 5.5.2 is a short-cycle security and maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.6.

You can download WordPress 5.5.2 by downloading from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now.

If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.

Security Updates

Ten security issues affect WordPress versions 5.5.1 and earlier. If you haven’t yet updated to 5.5, all WordPress versions since 3.7 have also been updated to fix the following security issues:

  • Props to Alex Concha of the WordPress Security Team for their work in hardening deserialization requests.
  • Props to David Binovec on a fix to disable spam embeds from disabled sites on a multisite network.
  • Thanks to Marc Montas from Sucuri for reporting an issue that could lead to XSS from global variables.
  • Thanks to Justin Tran who reported an issue surrounding privilege escalation in XML-RPC. He also found and disclosed an issue around privilege escalation around post commenting via XML-RPC.
  • Props to Omar Ganiev who reported a method where a DoS attack could lead to RCE.
  • Thanks to Karim El Ouerghemmi from RIPS who disclosed a method to store XSS in post slugs.
  • Thanks to Slavco for reporting, and confirmation from Karim El Ouerghemmi, a method to bypass protected meta that could lead to arbitrary file deletion.
  • Thanks to Erwan LR from WPScan who responsibly disclosed a method that could lead to CSRF.
  • And a special thanks to @zieladam who was integral in many of the releases and patches during this release.

Thank you to all of the reporters for privately disclosing the vulnerabilities. This gave the security team time to fix the vulnerabilities before WordPress sites could be attacked.

For more information, browse the full list of changes on Trac, or check out the version 5.5.2 HelpHub documentation page.

WooCommerce 4.6.1 Fix Release

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This release fixes WooCommerce Admin bugs introduced in WooCommerce 4.6.0.

The main issue affected stores running WooCommerce 4.6.0 together with the latest version of Gutenberg installed as a plugin. For those stores, the Analytics pages were empty (#5385).

The only change in WooCommerce core for this release is the inclusion of the latest version of WooCommerce Admin. Here is the full changelog for WooCommerce Admin 1.6.2:

  • Gutenberg compat fix for empty reports (leaderboard, customers report). #5409
  • Fix for missing activity panels. #5400
  • Adds array casting on onboarding profile option. #5415
  • Gutenberg compatibility fix for home screen inbox. #5416
  • i18n fix for Performance Indicators labels Home Screen. #5405

Thanks to everyone for reporting these issues promptly and helping out with the fix release.

You can download the latest release of WooCommerce here or visit Dashboard → Updates to update the plugin from your WordPress admin screen.