Blog & News

The WordPress team has officially announced the release of version 5.1. This update was named “Betty” in honor of the acclaimed jazz vocalist Betty Carter and focuses on system upgrades, editor performance increases, and some new, essential tools for site administrators and developers.

Site Health

With security and speed in mind, this release introduces WordPress’s first Site Health features. WordPress will begin showing notices to administrators of sites that run long-outdated versions of PHP, the programming language that powers WordPress.

When you set up new plugins, WordPress’s Site Health features will check them against the version of PHP you’re running. If the plugin requires a version that won’t work with your site, WordPress will keep you from installing that plugin.

Editor Performance

Introduced in WordPress 5.0, the brand-new block editor is constantly improving. WordPress 5.1 includes solid performance improvements to the editor, making it feel a little faster to start and smoother to type. The WordPress team will continue to introduce more performance improvements over the next couple of releases.

Developer Tools

• Multisite Metadata - 5.1 introduces a new database table to store metadata associated with sites and allows for the storage of arbitrary website information relevant for a multisite/network context.
• Cron API - The Cron API has been updated with new functions to assist with returning data and includes new filters for modifying cron storage. Other changes in behavior affect cron spawning on servers running FastCGI and PHP-FPM versions 7.0.16 and above.
• New JS Build Processes - WordPress 5.1 presents a brand-new JavaScript build option, following the large reorganization of code that started in the 5.0 release.
• Miscellaneous improvements including:
  • Updates to values for the WP_DEBUG_LOG constant
  • New test config file constant in the test suite, new plugin action hooks
  • Short-circuit filters for wp_unique_post_slug(), WP_User_Query, and count_users()
  • A new human_readable_duration function
  • Improved taxonomy metabox sanitization
  • Limited LIKE support for meta keys when using WP_Meta_Query
  • A new “doing it wrong” notice when registering REST API endpoints

For more information about the release, please make sure to visit the official WordPress release blog.