release of the web content management system . The release has been given the codename "Eckstine" in honor of the singer . This release is notable an automatic update mode for plugins and themes.
On one hand, this feature will help address the issue of using outdated plugins that become targets for attacks after vulnerabilities are discovered. On the other hand, there is a risk of automated distribution of malicious code resulting from compromise of plugin developers' systems or delivery of updates that include hidden, undesirable, or problematic functionality, which may disrupt certain configurations, for instance, due to incompatibility with other plugins or the cessation of support for certain features.
By default, automatic updates in WordPress 5.5 are disabled. Auto-updates can be selectively enabled for specific plugins and themes. Updates are checked twice a day by the wp-cron handler. Information about the installation of updates is sent via email and displayed on administrative pages. Additionally, a manual installation mode is offered, allowing for updates through the upload of a ZIP archive in the admin interface.
Other innovations in WordPress 5.5 include:
- Enabling support for lazy loading of images (using the "loading" attribute with the value "lazy" in the "img" tag). In this mode, images that are outside the visible area will not be loaded until the user scrolls the content of the page to a point just before the image.
- By default, XML sitemap generation is enabled to speed up the identification of important pages by search engines.
- Continued improvements to the block-based page layout visual editor: added support for templates of standard blocks combining text and multimedia data; built-in catalog for easier search of necessary blocks; provided image editing capabilities (cropping, scaling, rotating) directly in place.
- For developers, there is an option to define environments (such as testing, production, etc.) to run only the code related to those environments. The PHPMailer library has been updated to version 6.1.6 (previously version 5.2.27 was used). A more reliable cleaning of the OPcache cache has been implemented after plugin and theme updates.
Source: opennet.ru
