WordPress 5.5 was released last week with many new features and functionalities. WordPress 5.5 has crossed more than 5 million downloads already. And now, it is time we focus on the upcoming major release this year, WordPress 5.6. This major release will witness women in power. We will see an all-women release squad for WordPress 5.6.
All-women release squad does not mean men are not allowed to contribute. It only means the main releasing squad is going to be our wondrous women in WordPress. The full squad includes around 46 women. Josepha Haden will be leading the WordPress 5.6 release along with Dee Teal as the Release Coordinator.
According to the official announcement post, other Squad Leads for WordPress 5.6 are:
- Triage Lead: Tonya Mork
- Core Tech Lead: Helen Hou-Sandì
- Editor Tech Lead: Isabel Brison
- Design Leads: Ellen Bauer
- Design Tech Lead: Shital Marakana
- Accessibility Lead: Sarah Ricker
- Marketing Lead: Yvette Sonneveld
- Documentation Wrangler: TBD.
- Documentation Review Lead: Michele Butcher-Jones
- Default Theme Design Lead: Mel Choyce-Dwan
- Theme Development Lead (Default): Carolina Nymark
- Default Theme Wrangler: Jessica Lyschik
- Test Lead: Monika Rao
- Support Lead: Bet Hannon (@bethannon1)
Some of the exciting features we will see in 5.6 are a conversion of widget-editing areas, PHP 5.6.x support removal, navigation menus block in the core, automatic updates for major WP core releases, block editor enhancements, and more.
According to the Tentative Release Calendar, WordPress 5.6 will probably release on 8th December 2020.
The motive behind this all-women release squad is to inspire women in WordPress and increase the number of women who have that experience and (hopefully) become returning contributors to Core and elsewhere. Our WordPress community is very supportive of this plan and hopefully, we will see positive outcomes with it.