Everyone is very excited about the release of WordPress 5.2. It’s coming very soon, on Tuesday, May 7th.
This version of WordPress is not meant to be a big feature release. Its goal was only to work on the “9 Projects for 2019” list set by Matt for this year.
A lot of these projects have been improved and there have been smaller features added that will be very helpful for many people.
One of the most important features that are coming with WordPress 5.2 is Site Health Check plugin added to the WordPress core.
This plugin checks the setup of your site and helps you to optimize it, with a big part of its focus being on getting less technical users to upgrade from PHP 5.6 to 7+.
WordPress 5.2 will have this plugin included and it will be under the tools menu with 2 sections.
Another interesting thing in WordPress 5.2 is The Status Section that gives you feedback on your WordPress installation with tips for how to improve the performance and security of your site. This section will be particularly interesting for the people that sell WordPress products when trying to provide support. Also, there is a button ‘copy – to – clipboard’ to make it easy to send the info to customer support.
There is also the reintroduction of the White Screen of Death protection which was originally slated for 5.1. It still lets Admin login to their WordPress site when it “white screen of deaths” (typically due to a fatal error from a plugin) and letting them fix the issue more easily than the previous method.
One of the many updates on Gutenberg is Block Manager. It allows you to hide the blocks you are not interested in (and get rid of Verse block).
New Group block is the new sensation. It is a container or section block in which you can add other blocks. In it you have the possibility to change the background color of multiple blocks at once. The intention with this feature is that in the future it will work the same as a Cover block.
One big thing that is missing with this Group block is the ability to change font colors and backgrounds. This can be done with the paragraph block, but not with other blocks. You can change the paragraph text, but heading and captions remain the same.
There have also been improvements in the Privacy policy. Changes have been made mostly for developers, but as WordPress is open community everyone is welcomed to add any other suggestion.
For the full list of updates in WordPress 5.2 check out this field guide.
