Author: Bridget Willard

If you’re not subscribed to the Make WordPress Core Blog, then this post is for you.

Update 30 Mar 2021

The preplanning for WordPress 5.8 has a timetable and there is now a 21 day RC window (June 29 – July 20). WordPress 5.8 drops 20 July 21.

YAY!

There are now 21 days between the release candidate and WordPress 5.8.https://t.co/50jvlOQ9GP pic.twitter.com/Jd1jsdeel6

— Bridget Willard (@BridgetMWillard) March 30, 2021

Update 13 Mar 2021

The roadmap has been updated this week. WordPress 5.8 will be released in July and 5.9 in December. So, we’ll only have three WordPress Core Updates this calendar year. Yes, breathe a collective sigh of relief. Thank you, Josepha, for listening to the community.

“Here are a few things that might make this communication more difficult. If you can think of other communication challenges (or solutions to the ones below), please share them in the comments. We don’t have established communication channels with theme and plugin authors.”

Josepha Hayden

Josepha Hayden

Just when you were getting used to WordPress 5.6 and all of the jQuery issues, you’ve got more work to do, plugin devs. Don’t stop testing your themes and plugins. The next WordPress Core Update (5.7) is coming on March 9, 2021.

In fact, there will be four three WordPress Core updates in 2021 according to the roadmap. This is a healthy, yet robust schedule for plugin and theme developers. I suspect mostly for plugin developers.

The best marketing for a WordPress plugin is smooth updates for your users.

The First WordPress Core Update of 2021

WordPress 5.7 is currently open for bug scrubs and alpha contributions. So if trac is your jam, now is the time to contribute.

For plugin developers, you’ll want to get ready for the beta which will be available on February 2, 2021.

The release candidate for testing will be available two weeks later (Feb 23) and the WordPress Core update launches March 9.

Yes, the release candidate will be out in or 39 business days.

It is hard to keep track of all of these updates, I know. You can subscribe to WordPress Core updates on Make.WordPress.org.

What About WordPress 5.6?

First the good news. WordPress 5.6 “Simone” dropped on December 8, 2020 and I’m happy to have been listed as one of the contributors. (Yes, this marketer has brackets.) I reviewed copy on a few Trac tickets as well as editing and rewriting the baked-in copy on a few default themes.

What went wrong for me?

For people who were hosted by companies like Pressable (I’m now on SiteDistrict), it was an irreversible auto update for major core. Meaning, 5.5.x automatically updated to 5.6 without the ability to roll back. Normally, I’d be fine with that until I started building a landing page.

But the website didn’t break, you may say. Or did it? So, to me something “not working as expected” is a break. I was creating my landing page for my new book, “How To Market Your Plugin,” and needed to clone a form. Something that should have taken 20 minutes copying my template and cloning my Caldera Form took two hours.

To a visitor, my website was fine. I was frustrated. I tried clicking “clone” and nothing happened. So I clicked “create new form” and nothing happened.

I found out later that this was because of the changes in jQuery I had read about. You can read about the breaking changes in jQuery 3.0 on their blog. What’s the lesson? How people interact with their own websites also matters.

Finding the jQuery Migrate Helper Plugin

So, I spent about two hours the week WordPress 5.6 came out Googling and submitting support tickets to both Caldera and Pressable. I had no idea what was wrong. Pressable ended up installing the jQuery Migrate Helper plugin which solved the problem. Two days ago, Caldera rolled out an update that fixes that issue, so I deactivated and deleted the jQuery plugin (as per best practices).

Then I decided, I needed the option of, well, opting out of auto updates for WordPress Core. So, I moved my hosting to SiteDistrict, too. I’m fairly certain I lost four hours of billable time for that update and migration. It’s all part of supporting Open Source, right?

As an aside, you may want to read the WordFence article about the REST API application password vulnerability.

WordPress Core Updates Are A Good Thing

Hey, I’m all about software updates. I’m the first to update my iOS apps and Google Chrome and even WordPress. I have Updraft backing up my site and it’s all good. You know? I’m for it.

[bctt tweet=”It’s better marketing for plugin developers to take an active role in ensuring their code works with the release candidates.” username=”BridgetMWillard”]

You’ll have four, 14-day periods of testing to do in 2021. I suggest blocking out time in your production schedule and company calendar. You’ll be busy with support tickets if you don’t and your social media manager will be pinging you in Slack with all of the complaint tweets.

From WordPress Core

Proposed WordPress 5.7 Schedule

This cycle will have a similar timeframe than 5.6:

• Alpha, 78 days – 5.6 had 84 days
• Beta, 21 days – same as 5.6
• RC, 14 days – same as 5.6

** This post as my affiliate link for Beaver Builder

Is your plugin ready for PHP 8? Maybe I should ask if you’re ready for WordPress 5.6? Either way, there will be changes. Breaking ones. Read them all on PHP 8’s GitHub page.

PHP 8 comes out on Thanksgiving and WordPress 5.6 comes out 12 calendar days later. So, yay! Not so much? Also, why are there any software releases after October 15? If you believe in holidays, then believe in holidays. Sheesh.

I’ve reached out to my clients who build plugins and themes and none of them are surprised by either WordPress 5.6 coming or PHP 8. They’re a bit bummed that it means another holiday testing their code, but yeah. Welcome to plugin development in WordPress, right? Nothing new to see here, folks.

When is PHP 8 Coming Out?

General availability or GA of PHP 8 will be on 26 November, according to their calendar. PHP has 4 release candidates and the fourth will be on 12 November.

PHP Release Candidate 2 is available for testing as of 16 October and the third will drop 29 October. (PHP is international so the date is European style.)

When is WordPress 5.6 Coming Out?

The final release is set to come out December 8 according to this post on Make WordPress.

WordPress has a call for testing PHP 8 right now for 5.6. Testing feedback in the form of GitHub or Trac tickets closes November 17.

And, yes, WordPress 5.6 will have support for PHP 8. So you may as well make your plugin ready. Right?

“Even though WordPress 5.6 will add support for PHP 8.0, no changes will be made to the minimum required version of PHP at this time.” Andrei Draganescu (10/6/2020)

How Does PHP Affect My WordPress Website?

If you’re reading this and you’re a website owner but not a product or plugin developer, that’s okay. The bottom line is this: it’s best practices to have your software as up-to-date as possible. If you’re not sure, check with your web host.

WordPress is a content management system that uses PHP to talk between the servers, your website, and the browser. Generally, your website host determines how high you can upgrade your site’s PHP. My site is and I was on PHP 7.2, for example. I just upgraded to PHP 7.4. That was as high as I could go.

Should I Refactor for PHP 8?

Maybe. My suggestion from a strategic standpoint and manpower is to be ready for the future. In marketing and public relations, we like to be ahead of the story. It seems to me you save yourself a lot of work later if you plan for the future now.

“Refactoring WordPress plugins is no joke. But if you start with small functions like this and gradually work your way around the codebase, it gets easier.” Tom McFarlin

Maybe start another dev branch that is PHP 8 ready but wrapped to support down to 7.2 or something. 7.4 might be a better route, but it’s up to you.

We like to honor backward compatibility in WordPress but Gutenberg is already a major breaking change (though I seem to be the only one saying it). But that’s another blog post.

“PHP 8 is actually already at RC2 and will be released nov 26th. Re: WP vs PHP8 – as things stand, expect breakage in unexpected places. Most of WP is untested on PHP 8 and with WPs reliance on type juggling, things *will* break.” Juliette on Twitter 

How Should PHP 8 Affect My WordPress Plugin?

PHP 8 and WordPress plugins may be a bit of a challenge. Like I noted earlier, WordPress 5.6 (as of right now) will support PHP 8. Some of my friends, however, worry about some issues that will cause breakage.

Marketing Your Plugin’s Compatibility with PHP 8 and WordPress 5.6

Yes, you should let people know that your plugin is compatible with WordPress 5.6 and/or PHP 8. Start your GitHub repos, begin your documentation, write blog posts, include notes on update schedules on product pages. Tweet. Yeah. You should tell people.

Note that Josepha wrote: “WordPress 5.6 includes seven Gutenberg plugin releases.” SEVEN. So, maybe check those out.

What about Laravel and PHP 8?

Developers like Carl Alexander and Josh Pollock will be upgrading their Laravel products to PHP 8 right away. Why? Well, it’s a pretty complicated issue in WordPress. Laravel is newer.

Yes. There is way less need for backwards compatibility, less history and a smaller, more skilled developer ecosystem.

— Josh Pollock 🌱🌵🌲 (@Josh412) October 23, 2020

What about Microsoft and PHP 8?

When I read this quote on the Microsoft externals channel, I was aghast. It sounded like PHP 8 wouldn’t work on Windows Servers.

“We are not, however, going to be supporting PHP for Windows in any capacity for version 8.0 and beyond.” Dale Hirt, Service Engineer Microsoft

But, thankfully, after writing a comment on The WP Tavern, Andrey set me straight.

“PHP language is still absolutely supported and works on Windows.Microsoft discontinued donation of time and infrastructure to the process of producing Windows binaries of PHP. Just that.” Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko

He’s nice like that. One of my favorite people on the planet!

OMG This is So Long! TL;DR

• PHP 8 releases November 26.
• WordPress 5.6 Releases December 8.

Many of us who have been blogging for years are completely used to being able to post a link to a Facebook or Instagram post and it magically appearing.

That is from the oEmbed support from Facebook’s API. The old oEmbed endpoints end October 24, 2020. They have new Facebook oEmbed endpoints. The developer requirements, should you want to create your own app, are in that post.

Keep in mind that when we say “Facebook’s API” this also includes Instagram.

Search Engine Journal noted that the changes are retroactive.

“To be specific, an upcoming API update will remove support for unauthenticated Facebook and Instagram embeds. …The change is retroactive, so all Facebook and Instagram embeds on the sites of unauthenticated publishers will soon become broken. This has the potential to affect millions of sites.” Matt Southern

I will admit it was nice to see something about WordPress Core in SEJ!

Facebook and WordPress

As a result, WordPress Core (the base software not plugins and themes) is ending support for Facebook and Instagram oEmbeds as of WordPress 5.5.2.

I support this decision fully. As I wrote on the Trac ticket 50861:

As a writer and social media manager, who loves and depends upon oEmbeds (rather than screenshots), I completely understand the logic behind removal.

I completely agree this should become plugin-dependent.

Facebook is famous for changing the rules on their playground. And, honestly, APIs be like that sometimes. Right?

So, as far as communicating this to the general public, we should fill in the holes of people’s education.

WordPress 5.5.2 has an important update that affects oEmbeds of Facebook properties. This includes Instagram and Facebook links.

How Does This Affect You?

Previously, any WordPress blogger could simply insert a URL of a Facebook or Instagram post and the image and post would render. Like magic, but definitely technical.

Unfortunately, Facebook has made access to their API a bit more complicated which, cheers to them, helps protect the privacy of its user base.

If you’re worried about this update, check your posts for links that don’t unfurl/render. They will appear as regular links. It isn’t broken, it just doesn’t render. Instead, use the link like you would any link — in a sentence — with accessibility in mind.

You can always include a screenshot with alt tags and a caption as well

Jetpack to the Rescue

Well, it’s no surprise that Jetpack by Automattic finds a reason to be relevant again. They will be supporting oEmbeds from Facebook and Instagram as long as your site is connected to Jetpack.

“Facebook and Instagram are ending support for their oEmbed API on October 24. After this change, you must register a Facebook developer account, create an app, and provide a token when calling the new API. …Simply connect your site to Jetpack and start sharing. We’ll handle everything behind the scenes so you don’t have to worry about it.” Jetpack

But I Want My oEmbeds

If you don’t want to use Jetpack, and I get it, there are other plugins you can use. In the same WordPress Trac thread, Syed Balkhi suggests two of his company’s solutions:

“Just wanted to comment here, since our Smash Balloon Instagram and FB feed plugins are already used by over 1.2 million users, we have added the oEmbed functionality to it.

This was easy for us to do because to create custom feeds, users would have to use the API key anyways. Over the years, our plugin has simplified that process to make it very user-friendly.

I think it’d be helpful to recommend these because we DO NOT require users to go through a complicated FB app setup process or anything.

Instagram Feeds – https://wordpress.org/plugins/instagram-feed/
Facebook Feeds – https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-facebook-feed/

How Else Can I Link to Facebook and Instagram Posts?

The good news is that links are links. As long as the post is public, you can still create a link within the context of a paragraph. People can click the link and go to the post. It’s not that big of a deal. If you really want the visual, then take a screenshot. If you do that, make sure to include alt text and a link to the actual post. It’s a little bit of work, but worth it.