Release of the WordPress 5.5 web content management system with plugin auto-update support

Took place web content management system release WordPress 5.5. The release was given the code name "Eckstine" in honor of the singer Billy Eckstein. Issue notable emergence of auto-update plugins and themes.

On the one hand, this feature will solve the problem using old plugins that become targets of attacks after vulnerabilities are discovered in them. But, on the other hand, there is a danger of automated distribution of malicious code as a result of compromising the systems of add-on developers or delivering updates that include hidden, unwanted or problematic functionality that may break certain configurations, for example, due to incompatibility with other add-ons or the termination of support. some possibilities.

By default, automatic updates are disabled in WordPress 5.5. Auto-update can be enabled selectively for specific plugins and themes. Updates are checked twice a day by wp-cron. Update installation information is sent by email and displayed on service pages. In addition, a manual installation mode is offered, which allows you to update the add-on by downloading a ZIP archive in the administrator 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 viewable area will not be loaded until the user scrolls the page content to the location immediately preceding the image.
• The XML sitemap is enabled by default to speed up the identification of important pages by search engines.
• Improvement of the visual block layout editor continued: support for standard block templates that combine text and multimedia data has been added; built-in catalog to simplify the search for the desired blocks; provided the ability to edit images (crop, scale, rotate) in place.
• Developers are given the opportunity to define environments (test, production, etc.) to run only the code associated with these environments. The PHPMailer library has been updated to version 6.1.6 (previously used release 5.2.27). Implemented more reliable OPcache clearing after updating plugins and themes.

Source: opennet.ru