News WordPress July 9, 2020 Kuba Gaj

What’s New In WordPress: June 2020

It's time to see what's been cooking in WordPress in June.
What’s New In WordPress: June 2020

The first half of 2020 is already behind us but it has brought many significant changes to WordPress. June 2020 was yet another month of the core team’s progress towards full site editing. With the release of WordPress 5.4.2 and the online WordCamp Europe event, the last four weeks were quite an adventure!

WordPress 5.4.2 Release

June 10th marked the release of WordPress 5.4.2, the most up-to-date version of the platform. With this security and maintenance update, the WordPress team has introduced 17 fixes and 4 enhancements. Even though this is a short-cycle maintenance release that’s meant to be replaced with WordPress 5.5 in August this year, this doesn’t mean it’s not significant. Remember to update your website as soon as possible (and to have a backup just in case).

Are you curious about the details of the WordPress 5.4.2 update?

Contributors’ Investigations Lead To Security Fixes

Kudos to WordPress contributors for discovering a handful of security issues in WordPress 5.3 & 5.4. Thanks to their private disclosure of these vulnerabilities, the security team was able to implement fixes before a chance for WordPress being compromised showed up.

With WordPress 5.4.2, the team introduced, among others, fixes to three XSS issues and open redirect issue in wp_validate_redirect(). They’ve also sealed the comments under password-protected posts and pages shut.

WordPress 5.4.2 is another step towards full site editing.

Maintenance Updates For 5.1, 5.2, And 5.3

For those of you who haven’t updated to 5.4 yet, the team has deployed a maintenance update to the previous versions of the platform, including WordPress 5.1, 5.2 & 5.3.

Fixes For Twenty Twenty & Other Themes

With WordPress 5.4.2, a number of bugs in major WP’s themes is fixed. Most of them relate to the Twenty Twenty theme, like fixing the dropdown category widget, anchor links for mobile menu, positioning of images in list blocks, or TikTok social icon. Others introduce changes to Twenty Nineteen and Twenty Eleven theme or fix the overall issue of spammers being able to share unmoderated comments. Head to Trac for detailed insight on all these.

WordPress In June 2020: Gutenberg 8.3 & 8.4

Repeating the May pattern, the core team has launched two new versions of Gutenberg in June 2020. Version 8.3 reorganized the block categories’ set, introduced a parent block selector, user-controlled link color options, and experimental padding control. In Gutenberg 8.4, users can work with new image-editing tools and have the ability to edit options for multiple blocks. The ‘block category search’ feature is now removed from the experimental phase and available for all Gutenberg installations.

Both releases are another step to closing the Full Site Editing and Navigation Screen project. For details on their improvements, follow for Gutenberg 8.3 and 8.4 documentation.

Many grand things await for developers in WordPress in June 2020.

PHP 7.2 As Minimum

After discussing the topic with the core Site Health team and the Hosting team, WordPress has bumped the minimum PHP recommendation to 7.2. This is reflected in the ServeHappy API, while the WordPress download page recommends 7.3 or newer.

CodeCanyon’s best-selling WordPress plugins in June 2020 included a selection of various categories, mostly targeted towards end-user experience. See the Top 10 list below:

  1. Slider Revolution
  2. Ultimate Membership Pro
  3. FileBird
  4. Bookly PRO
  5. WordPress Automatic Plugin
  6. WPBakery Page Builder
  7. YellowPencil
  8. Essential Grid Gallery
  9. Ultimate Addons For WPBakery
  10. EventON

WordPress In June 2020

Last month was the time of maintenance and progress towards WordPress 5.5, scheduled to arrive in the upcoming weeks. A handful of features and fixes introduced in Gutenberg allows for even more customization than before. June also brought a slight mix-up on the Code Canyon’s best-selling WordPress plugins, with FileBird advancing to the top three and Essential Grid Gallery jumping to #8. This calls for an interesting summer for the WordPress community!