On Thursday, WordPress announced the release candidate for version 4.8 was readily available. The organization said they expect the community to find some bugs they missed before launching the full, definitive version next week on June 8.
WordPress invited the community to give the release a test run just weeks after launching their latest security update. Developers at the blogging platform keep a tight schedule that, last time, dealt with some critical threats to the system.
HackerOne partnered up with WordPress as part of its most recent security update. The patch included bounties up at the user-driven site for severe flaws like cross-site scripting and (XSS) and remote code execution (RCE). These same vulnerabilities now threaten to affect millions of streamers around the world.
What’s new in WordPress 4.8?
The organization has been releasing beta versions of WordPress 4.8 since the beginning of the month. In the Beta 1 announcement blog post, developers said the next version of the platform would bring three main improvements.
First, 4.8 will ship with an enhanced and “hard to describe” visual editor experience. The new TinyMCE allows users to navigate content more intuitively in text entries. Many of the release notes for later versions include additions and patches to these components.
Second, the dashboard news widget is getting an overhaul in WordPress 4.8. The next big release of the popular platform will expand its reach to cover events happening nearby and supported community gatherings like WordCamps right in the widget.
Third, there will be a wide array of multimedia elements coming in the form of widgets to the upcoming WordPress release. These are intended to further enhance the editing experience with audio, video, image, and text elements to make content more dynamic.
With this in mind, WordPress developers have arrived at a release candidate after the community reported several issues with the beta versions. They went through the log reports one by one and patched them to make it stable enough for widespread testing.
Still, there are a few common issues that persist even in the release candidate. WordPress says users can expect some finicky behavior of the About page on their sites, and also with the Twenty Sixteen theme with the rest of the platform’s core.
More emoji support is coming to WordPress 4.8, so Emoji 5 and Twemoji 2.3.0 are also experiencing some drawbacks according to tickets from users. Nevertheless, the release candidate is up for grabs via the Beta Tester as usual, and you can download the zip file directly as well from the official site.
Source: WordPress