WordPress 4.9 is scheduled to be released on 14 November 2017.

Enhancements will focus on “editing code and managing plugins and themes” as Matt Mullenweg explained last June. Changes include:

• Drafting and scheduling changes in the Customizer
• A revised gallery widget
• Support for short codes and media in text widgets
• Support for additional sources of videos in the video widget, including Facebook videos
• A better coding experience

Our development team here at WP Hosting are particularly happy to see additional security improvements such as hardening against prohibited actions and confirmation links users need to click on when they update their email address.

You can see the full list of updates in the WordPress Beta 4.9 Beta 1 post and refer to the WordPress 4.9 Development Cycle notes for timings.

Try WordPress 4.9 out (in a Staging environment)

WordPress 4.9 Release Candidate 2 is the latest release at the time of writing – you can download it (or any subsequent release) here.

If you’re not familiar with setting up a staging version of your site for testing purposes you can do this:

• Make sure your core, plugins and themes are up to date, make a back up of your site and check that it works
• Set up a fresh instance of WordPress in your hosting environment, pointing a sub-domain to it
• Install the Duplicator plugin (or similar) on both your live Production and Staging sites
• Follow the plugin’s instructions to copy your Production site to the Staging one
• Download the Beta and update Staging
• Test both the front and back end thoroughly

If something breaks then you may want to disable your plugins to see if one of them may be causing a conflict with the updated core, or repeating the process when a new version of the beta is released.

The above steps are good practice for testing stable releases too, before you upgrade your Production web site.

Feel free to share your thoughts below or get in touch with us.