The newest version of the WordPress Coding Standards, WordPress Coding Standards 1.0.0 was released last week, after nine long years since the project first began in 2009.
The WordPress Coding Standards, a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules or sniffs is to validate the code developed for the amazing WordPress platform. The collection also ensures the code quality and adherence to coding conventions. The purpose of the WordPress Coding Standards is to create a baseline for collaboration and review within various aspects of the WordPress and the community, from core code to themes to plugins.
About the new WordPress Coding Standards 1.0.0, it contains a number of breaking changes. According to the official release on GitHub, if you use the WordPress Coding Standards with a custom ruleset, be aware that a number of sniffs have been moved between categories and that the old sniff names have been deprecated. You have to update your custom ruleset if you selectively include any of these sniffs in your custom ruleset or set custom property values for these sniffs.
Also, the WordPress-VIP ruleset has been deprecated. If you used that ruleset to check your theme/plugin for hosting on the WordPress.com VIP platform, make sure you use the Automattic VIP coding standards instead as they have their own VIP coding standards available for public use.
If you used the WordPress-VIP ruleset for any other reason, you should probably use WordPress-Extra or WordPress ruleset instead. You can know more about this in the Deprecated section on the changelog.
Before upgrading to WordPress Coding Standards 1.0.0, make sure you pay attention to the full changelog first.