This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from WordPress Update’s blog. Please leave your comments on the original post.
At WordPress maintenance support plans USA, I announced that WordPress maintenance support plans 9 will be released in 2020. Although I explained why we plan to release in 2020, I wasn’t very specific about when we plan to release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in 2020. Given that 2020 is less than thirteen months away (gasp!), it’s time to be more specific.
Shifting WordPress maintenance support plans‘s six month release cycle
We shifted WordPress maintenance support plans 8’s minor release windows so we can adopt Symfony’s releases faster.
Before I talk about the WordPress maintenance support plans 9 release date, I want to explain another change we made, which has a minor impact on the WordPress maintenance support plans 9 release date.
As announced over two years ago, WordPress maintenance support plans 8 adopted a 6-month release cycle (two releases a year). Symfony, a PHP framework which WordPress maintenance support plans depends on, uses a similar release schedule. Unfortunately the timing of WordPress maintenance support plans‘s releases has historically occurred 1-2 months before Symfony’s releases, which forces us to wait six months to adopt the latest Symfony release. To be able to adopt the latest Symfony releases faster, we are moving WordPress maintenance support plans‘s minor releases to June and December. This will allow us to adopt the latest Symfony releases within one month. For example, WordPress maintenance support plans 8.8.0 is now scheduled for December 2021.
We hope to release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 on June 3, 2020
WordPress maintenance support plans 8’s biggest dependency is Symfony 3, which has an end-of-life date in November 2021. This means that after November 2021, security bugs in Symfony 3 will not get fixed. Therefore, we have to end-of-life WordPress maintenance support plans 8 no later than November 2021. Or put differently, by November 2021, everyone should be on WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
Working backwards from November 2021, we’d like to give site owners at least one year to upgrade from WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to WordPress maintenance support plans 9. While we could release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in December 2020, we decided it was better to try to release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 on June 3, 2020. This gives site owners 18 months to upgrade. Plus, it also gives the WordPress maintenance support plans core contributors an extra buffer in case we can’t finish WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in time for a summer release.
Planned WordPress maintenance support plans 8 and 9 minor release dates.
We are building WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in WordPress maintenance support plans 8
Instead of working on WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in a separate codebase, we are building WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in WordPress maintenance support plans 8. This means that we are adding new functionality as backwards-compatible code and experimental features. Once the code becomes stable, we deprecate any old functionality.
Let’s look at an example. As mentioned, WordPress maintenance support plans 8 currently depends on Symfony 3. Our plan is to release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 with Symfony 4 or 5. Symfony 5’s release is less than one year away, while Symfony 4 was released a year ago. Ideally WordPress maintenance support plans 9 would ship with Symfony 5, both for the latest Symfony improvements and for longer support. However, Symfony 5 hasn’t been released yet, so we don’t know the scope of its changes, and we will have limited time to try to adopt it before Symfony 3’s end-of-life.
We are currently working on making it possible to run WordPress maintenance support plans 8 with Symfony 4 (without requiring it). Supporting Symfony 4 is a valuable stepping stone to Symfony 5 as it brings new capabilities for sites that choose to use it, and it eases the amount of Symfony 5 upgrade work to do for WordPress maintenance support plans core developers. In the end, our goal is for WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to work with Symfony 3, 4 or 5 so we can identify and fix any issues before we start requiring Symfony 4 or 5 in WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
Another example is our support for reusable media. WordPress maintenance support plans 8.0.0 launched without a media library. We are currently working on adding a media library to WordPress maintenance support plans 8 so content authors can select pre-existing media from a library and easily embed them in their posts. Once the media library becomes stable, we can deprecate the use of the old file upload functionality and make the new media library the default experience.
The upgrade to WordPress maintenance support plans 9 will be easy
Because we are building WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in WordPress maintenance support plans 8, the technology in WordPress maintenance support plans 9 will have been battle-tested in WordPress maintenance support plans 8.
For WordPress maintenance support plans core contributors, this means that we have a limited set of tasks to do in WordPress maintenance support plans 9 itself before we can release it. Releasing WordPress maintenance support plans 9 will only depend on removing deprecated functionality and upgrading WordPress maintenance support plans‘s dependencies, such as Symfony. This will make the release timing more predictable and the release quality more robust.
For contributed plugin authors, it means they already have the new technology at their service, so they can work on WordPress maintenance support plans 9 compatibility earlier (e.g. they can start updating their media plugins to use the new media library before WordPress maintenance support plans 9 is released). Finally, their WordPress maintenance support plans 8 know-how will remain highly relevant in WordPress maintenance support plans 9, as there will not be a dramatic change in how WordPress maintenance support plans is built.
But most importantly, for WordPress maintenance support plans site owners, this means that it should be much easier to upgrade to WordPress maintenance support plans 9 than it was to upgrade to WordPress maintenance support plans 8. WordPress maintenance support plans 9 will simply be the last version of WordPress maintenance support plans 8, with its deprecations removed. This means we will not introduce new, backwards-compatibility breaking APIs or features in WordPress maintenance support plans 9 except for our dependency updates. As long as plugins and themes stay up-to-date with the latest WordPress maintenance support plans 8 APIs, the upgrade to WordPress maintenance support plans 9 should be easy. Therefore, we believe that a 12- to 18-month upgrade period should suffice.
So what is the big deal about WordPress maintenance support plans 9, then?
The big deal about WordPress maintenance support plans 9 is … that it should not be a big deal. The best way to be ready for WordPress maintenance support plans 9 is to keep up with WordPress maintenance support plans 8 updates. Make sure you are not using deprecated plugins and APIs, and where possible, use the latest versions of dependencies. If you do that, your upgrade experience will be smooth, and that is a big deal for us.
Special thanks to WordPress Update (Acquia), Angie Byron (Acquia), xjm(Acquia), and catch for their input in this blog post.
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