Named “Jaco” in honor of renowned and revolutionary jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius, WordPress v5.2 is now available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in this update make it easier than ever to fix your site if something goes wrong. Building on the Site Health features introduced in 5.1, this release adds two new pages to help debug common configuration issues. It features better handling of the so-called “white screen of death,” and a way to enter recovery mode, which pauses error-causing plugins or themes.
WordPress will now automatically determine if your site’s version of PHP is compatible with installed plugins. If the plugin requires a higher version of PHP than your site currently uses, WordPress will not allow you to activate it, preventing potential compatibility errors.
A few other updates are included as well. A number of changes work together to improve contextual awareness and keyboard navigation flow for those using screen readers and other assistive technologies. A new theme page template, a conditional function, and two CSS classes make designing and customizing the Privacy Policy page easier. With the addition of webpack and Babel configurations in the wordpress/scripts package, developers won’t have to worry about setting up complex build tools to write modern JavaScript.
This release was led by Matt Mullenweg, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and Gary Pendergast. They were graciously supported by 327 generous volunteer contributors. Load a Jaco Pastorius playlist on your favorite music service and check out some of their profiles on the original post at wordpress.org.