A Quick Update on WordPress 5.0 Release Candidate

WordPress 5.0 Release Candidate (RC) was expected to ship out on November 19, 2018. However, with a large number of open issues and confirmed bugs on the milestone, the RC is now expected to be released on U.S. Thanksgiving Holiday.

The WordPress core committers, core contributors, and former release leads made last-minute appeals on Monday for the WordPress 5.0 release to be postponed to January.

Joe McGill said wrote, “I do not see how we can seriously ship a release candidate today. In doing so, we are either saying we’re ok with shipping a major version of WordPress with this many known issues or that the term ‘release candidate’ does not actually have meaning. I would suggest that we revise the schedule to push back RC for at least 4 weeks so we have a reasonable deadline and, in the meantime, continue releasing betas.”

Contributors said they don’t understand the rush to get 5.0. Several noted that Gutenberg seems to be measured by a different rod of success than previous releases where headline features were held to a different standard in regards to shipping known bugs.

Nearly every contributor involved in the discussion was enthusiastic about Gutenberg but urged release lead, Matt Mullenweg to allow for four weeks of RC and code freeze to give the community to prepare. Whereas Mullenweg identified a few questions he sees as “good measures of success for Gutenberg:”

  • Are people, when given the choice, choosing to use it over the old editor?
  • Can they create things they weren’t able to create before?
  • Are new-to-WP users more successful (active, happy with what they create) than pre-Gutenberg?
  • Are interesting things being built on top of it?

You can learn more about the discussion here.

Gutenberg 4.5 was released yesterday, matching the first 5.0 RC feature set. It includes a large number of changes and bug fixes that have gone relatively untested by the community at large. Most notably, 4.5 introduced a regression that caused a white screen of death when trying to load custom post types in the classic editor, forcing a 4.5.1 release earlier in the day.

There is a nice set of plugins built based on the Gutenberg editor, however, according to the plugin developers, every Gutenberg release introduces changes that cause their plugins to break. It then requires immediate updates from plugin developers.

Matias Ventura updated that WordPress 5.0 will be missing the planned November 27 release date. However, he did not provide any secondary date for the release.

 

Reference: WP Tavern

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