WordPress 5.6 Beta 3

WordPress 5.6 Beta 3 is now available for testing!

This software is still in development, so we recommend that you run this version on a test site.

You can test the WordPress 5.6 beta in two ways:

• Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “bleeding edge nightlies” option).
• Or download the beta here (zip).

The current target for the final release is December 8, 2020. This is just five weeks away, so your help is needed to ensure this release is tested properly.

Thank you to all of the contributors that tested the beta 2 development release and provided feedback. Testing for bugs is an important part of polishing each release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.

Some Highlights

Since beta 2, 20 bugs have been fixed. Here is a summary of a few changes included in beta 3:

• Added block patterns for Twenty Twenty (see #51098) and Twenty Nineteen (see #51099) themes.
• Added theme support for navigation-widgets (see #51445).
• Fixed incorrect slashes in the URL if the parent is empty for REST API (see #44745).
• Added a test to Site Health to verify that the Authorization header is working as expected for Application Passwords (see #51638).
• 10 additional bugs fixed in the block editor (see #26588).

To see all of the features for each Gutenberg release in detail, check out the release posts: 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3.

Developer notes

WordPress 5.6 has lots of refinements to the developer experience as well. To keep up, subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog and pay special attention to the developers’ notes for updates on those and other changes that could affect your products.

How to Help

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.

Props to @hellofromtonya, @davidbaumwald for help and @chanthaboune  for final review.