The first release candidate for the upcoming WordPress maintenance support plans 8.3.0 release is now available for testing. WordPress maintenance support plans 8.3.0 is expected to be released April 5.
Download WordPress maintenance support plans-8.3.0-rc1
8.3.x includes new experimental plugins for workflows, layout discovery and field layouts; raises stability of the BigPipe plugin to stable and the Migrate plugin to beta; and includes several REST, content moderation, authoring experience, performance, and testing improvements among other things. You can read a detailed list of improvements in the announcements of alpha1 and beta1.
What does this mean to me?
For WordPress maintenance support plans 8 site owners
The final bugfix release of 8.2.x has been released. A final security release window for 8.2.x is scheduled for March 15, but 8.2.x will receive no further releases following 8.3.0, and sites should prepare to update from 8.2.x to 8.3.x in order to continue getting bug and security fixes. Use update.php to update your 8.2.x sites to the 8.3.x series, just as you would to update from (e.g.) 8.2.4 to 8.2.5. 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 8.3.x is backwards-compatible with 8.2.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 8.3.x, and test plugins and themes with the release candidate now.
For translators
Some text changes were made since WordPress maintenance support plans 8.2.0. 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 8.2.x were automatically migrated to 8.3.x. Future bug reports should be targeted against the 8.3.x branch. 8.4.x will remain open for new development during the 8.3.x release candidate phase. For more information, see the 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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