The first release candidate for WordPress 5.8 is now available! 
Please join us in celebrating this very important milestone in the community’s progress towards the final release of WordPress 5.8!
“Release Candidate” means the new version is ready for release, but with thousands of plugins and themes and differences in how the millions of people use WordPress, it is possible something was missed. WordPress 5.8 is slated for release on July 20, 2021, but your help is needed to get there—if you have not tried 5.8 yet, now is the time!
You can test the WordPress 5.8 release candidate in three ways:
- Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the
Bleeding edgechannel and thenBeta/RC Onlystream) - Directly download the release candidate version (zip)
- Using WP-CLI to test:
wp core update --version=5.8-RC1
Thank you to all of the contributors who tested the Beta releases and gave feedback. Testing for bugs is a critical part of polishing every release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.
What is in WordPress 5.8?
The second release of 2021 continues to progress on the block editor towards the promised future of full site editing with these updates:
- Manage Widgets with Blocks
- Display Posts with New Blocks and Patterns
- Edit Post Templates
- Overview of the Page Structure
- Suggested Patterns for Blocks
- Style and Colorize Images
theme.json- Dropping support for IE11
- Adding support for WebP
- Adding Additional Block Supports
- Version 10.7 of the Gutenberg plugin
WordPress 5.8 also has lots of refinements to enhance the developer experience. To learn more, subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog and pay special attention to the developer notes tag for updates on those and other changes that could affect your products.
Plugin and Theme Developers
Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.8 and update the Tested up to version in the readme file to 5.8. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to the support forums, so those can be figured out before the final release.
The WordPress 5.8 Field Guide, due to be published very shortly, will give you a deeper dive into the major changes.
How to Help
Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages! This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 5.8 release schedule.
If you think you have found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We would love to hear from you! If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.
Props to @audrasjb, @cbringmann, @webcommsat, and @pbiron for copy suggestions and final review.
We are almost there,
WordPress 5.8 comes next month.
We need your help: test!
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