WordPress 5.0 Beta 5

WordPress 5.0 Beta 5 is now available!

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.

There are two ways to test this WordPress 5.0 Beta: try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”), or you can download the beta here (zip).

Reminder: the WordPress 5.0 release date has changed. It is now scheduled for release on November 27, and we need your help to get there. Here are some of the big issues that we’ve fixed since Beta 4:

Block Editor

The block editor has been updated to match the Gutenberg 4.4 release, the major changes include:

•  A permalink panel has been added to the document sidebar to make it easier to find.
• Editor document panels can now be programmatically removed.
• The uploading indicator for images and galleries has been replaced with a spinner and faded out image.
• The text and code editing blocks will now use the full width of the editor.
• Image handling has been improved. Images now take up the right amount of space for themes with wider editors (like Twenty Nineteen).
• Hover styles are now correctly disabled for mobile devices.
• The i18n module has been refactored to benefit from significant performance gains.

Additionally, there have been some pesky bugs fixed:

• Better handling for links without an href attribute, which were showing as undefined.
• Japanese text (double byte characters) are now usable in the list block.
• Better handling for different text encodings (e.g. emoji) within a block in block validation.

A full list of changes can be found in the Gutenberg 4.4 release post.

PHP 7.3 Support

The final known PHP 7.3 compatibility issue has been fixed. You can brush up on what you need to know about PHP 7.3 and WordPress by checking out the developer note on the Make WordPress Core blog.

Twenty Nineteen

Work on making Twenty Nineteen ready for prime time continues on its GitHub repository. This update includes a host of tweaks and bug fixes, including:

• Add .button class support.
• Fix editor font-weights for headings.
• Improve support for sticky toolbars in the editor.
• Improve text-selection custom colors for better contrast and legibility.
• Fix editor to prevent Gutenberg’s meta boxes area from overlapping the content.

How to Help

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages! 

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.