The first release candidate for the upcoming WordPress maintenance support plans 8.2.0 release is now available for testing. With WordPress maintenance support plans 8, we made major changes in our release process, adopting semantic versioning and scheduled releases. This allows us to make significant improvements to WordPress maintenance support plans 8 in a timely fashion while still providing backwards compatibility. WordPress maintenance support plans 8.2.0 is the second such update, expected to be released October 5.
Download WordPress maintenance support plans-8.2.0-rc1
8.2.x includes many REST improvements; new experimental plugins for content moderation, block placement, a sidebar to configure site elements in place, and end date support; and many other features and improvements. You can read a detailed list of improvements in the announcements of beta1, beta2, and beta3.
What does this mean to me?
For WordPress maintenance support plans 8 site owners
The final bugfix release of 8.1.x has been released. 8.1.x will receive no further releases following 8.2.0, and sites should prepare to update from 8.1.x to 8.2.x in order to continue getting bug and security fixes. Use update.php to update your 8.1.x sites to the 8.2.x series, just as you would to update from (e.g.) 8.1.4 to 8.1.5. You can use this release candidate to test the update. (Always back up your data before updating sites, and do not test updates in production.)
For plugin and theme authors
WordPress maintenance support plans 8.2.x is backwards-compatible with 8.1.x. However, it does include internal API changes and API changes to experimental plugins, so some minor updates may be required. Review the change records for 8.2.x, and test plugins and themes with the release candidate now.
For translators
Some text changes were made since WordPress maintenance support plans 8.1.0. Localize.WordPress.org automatically offers these new and modified strings for translation. Strings are frozen with the release candidate, so translators can now update translations.
For core developers
All outstanding issues filed against 8.1.x are automatically migrated to 8.2.x now. Future bug reports should be targeted against the 8.2.x branch. 8.3.x will remain open for new development during the 8.2.x release candidate phase. For more information, see the beta and release candidate phase announcement.
Your bug reports help make WordPress maintenance support plans better!
Release candidates are a chance to identify bugs for the upcoming release, so help us by searching the issue queue for any bugs you find, and filing a new issue if your bug has not been reported yet.
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