The newest version of Jetpack, Jetpack 5.9 was released on March 6, 2018. The updated version includes some general maintenance items. Many of the improvements were included due to the feedback received after the previous release of Jetpack—Jetpack 5.8 that focused on search and lazy loading images.
Jetpack 5.9 includes the improvement in Jetpack search, a filter added to the lazy loading images feature, easy sign out from the WordPress.com toolbar, and other enhancements.
After receiving some amazing feedback from the Jetpack users about the Elasticsearch-powered search feature in the Professional plans, the team has now included some crucial changes to its behavior in this release.
Jetpack will now implicitly activate this feature when the Jetpack Search Widget gets added to a sidebar. The link from the Jetpack Search settings card will not properly direct you to the Widgets section in the customizer making it easier to add and customize the search widget.
In addition to this, any active Jetpack Search widgets will be moved to the inactive list if you disable the search feature.
Jetpack 5.9 has added a filter to the lazy loading images feature. Jetpack has now allowed images to be ignored by the lazy loading images feature if they contain a reserved class name — by default, skip-lazy, or a custom one you define via the new jetpack_lazy_images_blacklisted_classes filter.
To use this on your site, apply the like skip-lazy class to a post or page with images, and verify that they do not load in a deferred fashion when visiting the content from the frontend.
With the updated version, signing out from the WordPress.com Toolbar now no longer logs you out of WordPress.com. Before this feature was introduced, you would be signed out of WordPress.com when your site had the WordPress.com Toolbar enabled and you signed out of your site. With Jetpack 5.9, if you sign out from the toolbar, you will only be logged out of your site — not WordPress.com. You will still be able to configure Jetpack from WordPress.com if you wish to.
Some of the additional performance enhancements are listed below:
- We improved the way we handle characters for the minor conditions drop-down of the Widget Visibility. For example, categories containing names with an ampersand will now be properly shown.
- We added support for excerpts to the Portfolio and Testimonial custom post types.
- A new filter, jetpack_twitter_image_default, was added to allow themes and plugins to customize twitter: image when no suitable image is found automatically.
- We removed an error that would occasionally appear when attempting to connect a site after clicking the Jetpack banner in the WordPress Dashboard.
You can check out the changelog to know more about the full list of updates and changes in Jetpack 5.9. You can get in touch with the members of Jetpack if you have anything to ask about the new update or want to give feedback.
Reference: Jetpack