WordPress 5.3 “Kirk”

WordPress 5.3 “Kirk” has been released.

I guess many of the people out there are running on hosted solutions, so your upgrade will happen when your hosting company decides to apply it. For those that self-host, you’re just a button press away.

This morning I’ve updated 5 separate blogs, all hosted independently, and they all went through fine. At the moment the upgrades have to be manually initiated, but I’m guessing in a few days they’ll just run through automatically.

Since it was introduced, the Site Health feature (Tools > Site Health) has been improved with each release. It’s worth running this to check if there are any recommended security or performance settings. The new release picked up some things the previous release didn’t. My website was bounced a couple of times while I made changes to sort them.

If I’m honest, I can barely notice a difference. I’m not a “power user” of WordPress. I just write blog posts with it. There are allegedly improvements to the block editing, but I really can’t tell. A couple of the popup controls look a little different, but from the way I use it, that’s about all. I’m sure people with different usage patterns will have a different reaction to this release.

I was interested to see what the Twenty Twenty theme would look like. Not my cup of tea! 🙂

It wouldn’t surprise me if we get a couple of quick maintenance releases coming out soon, but I still think it’s worth pushing forward with this stuff. No point living in the past. 🙂

Happy upgrading…

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 5.2 “Jaco”

WordPress 5.2 “Jaco” was released yesterday.

For the most part these updates pass me by as I’m not too interested in WordPress features. I just write stuff and publish it. Simple as that. So often I just apply them and forget about them.

One thing that did catch my eye was the mentioned improvement to the Site Health feature, available from “Tools > Site Health”.

After upgrading 5 different WordPress installations, I checked the Site Health on this blog and there were a few things flagged. It turned out I wasn’t on the latest version of PHP, I was on an older version of PHP7, and I had one mandatory and two optional modules missing. I fixed all that with the following.

wget http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-7.rpm
yum-config-manager --enable remi-php73
yum update -y
yum install -y php-gd php-bcmath php-pecl-imagick

If you were on the website or blog this morning, you may have had a bit of a funky experience as I restarted Apache a few times. 🙂

All the Site Health tests are passed now. Happy days.

The WordPress update itself went smoothly. I’m guessing by the time you read this, your site may have auto-upgraded anyway.

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 5.0.2

I posted a few days ago about the release of WordPress 5.0. As I said at the time, you can always expect a rash of new updates after a major release and this is the second maintenance release since then. There’s no drama, as these maintenance releases are applied automatically, so by the time you read this, you will probably already have it. The point of this post is to remind you to check for the other updates that aren’t automatic.

Since the release of version 5.0 I’ve had a lot of updates to plugins and some theme updates. The 5.0.2 release has come with another bunch of theme updates too. None of the plugin and theme updates happen automatically, so if you are self-hosting, remember to check the updates to these components. Running old versions of plugins and themes can present a security risk, as well as leading to unexpected behaviour of your site.

Happy upgrading. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 5.0

Especially if you are self-hosting WordPress, you might have noticed that WordPress 5.0 has been born.

I’m not a WordPress aficionado, so I don’t really pay much attention to most of the WordPress new features, but something you can’t avoid is the new editor. It’s completely different.

The new editor has been available for some time for the previous WordPress version as the “Gutenburg Plugin”. The dashboard has been encouraging you to try it for ages. Once you get to WordPress 5.0 you can switch back to the original editor using the “Classic Editor” plugin, that will allegedly be supported until 2021.

What are/were my my first impressions? I previously tried the Gutenberg plugin and pretty much hated it, and switched back right away. 🙂 Now it is the main editor I’m going to try and stick with it.

I think the first thing that might freak you out is the idea of blocks. At first it seems really odd, as it implied to me I’ve got to add a new block every time I want a new paragraph. Not so! You just type and it figures out the block thing out for you. Type “return” and you start a new block. I think I’m probably guilty of over-thinking a lot of this stuff, rather than going with the flow and just seeing what happens.

I find it interesting how in some aspects of my life I’m quick to embrace change, like in the Oracle world, but in other parts of my life changes cause me problems. I think it probably comes down to what I’m interested in. I’m just not interested in blogging tools. I’m interested in blogging itself.

I’m also acutely aware that I often resist change, then a couple of weeks down the line I can barely remember a time before the change. I’m pretty sure that will be the case here. Today it took me a few minutes to figure out how to put that WordPress logo in the top-left of this post, whereas previously it took a second. I think it’s actually easier now and more WYSIWYG than it was before, but when it’s different, it feels wrong. 🙂

So that’s it. Give it a go and see what you think!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I expect a whole bunch of updates to come in the next few weeks as they discover all the bugs and security holes they’ve put into the new version. 🙂

WordPress 4.9.3 and 4.9.4

I’ve given up on posting about new WordPress releases as most of you who are self-hosting are probably using the automatic update feature, so by the time you read my release announcement you’ve already upgraded automatically. Not this time… 🙂

Yesterday WordPress 4.9.3 was released and got automatically applied to the five WordPress blogs I look after. As well as fixing a bunch of bugs, 4.9.3 also broke the automatic update feature, so you are going to be stuck on 4.9.3 until you manually click the upgrade button. If you are self hosting WordPress, it’s a good idea to log in and manually click the upgrade button, so you get WordPress 4.9.4, and all subsequent upgrades automatically. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan”

WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan” has been released.

The headline features from my perspective are:

  • RESTful web services, so you can do stuff outside the main admin interface.
  • The new “Twenty Seventeen” theme.

There are lots of other features, but they all seem a bit like fluff to me. 🙂

I’ve done the upgrade on five installations and it worked fine on all of them. By the time you read this you may have gone through the auto-update anyway.

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 4.6 “Pepper”

WordPress 4.6 “Pepper” has been released.

All 5 of the installations I manage had it listed as available, but like most new major releases, it hasn’t been set to auto-update immediately, so if you want it today you will have to log in and give the updater a nudge.

The update itself was really quick and didn’t give any errors. There have been some updates to the default themes recently, so if you don’t keep up with those updates, you might see a number of theme and plugin updates that need doing also. I’m a bit of a compulsive upgrader, so I had already done those. 🙂

Expect a quick burst of small updates over the coming weeks as the new bugs this has introduced get fixed. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…