WordPress 5.2 was released as scheduled on Tuesday. Thanks to Site Health, PHP Error Protection, and the minimum PHP version bump (to 5.6.20), this has been one of the best-received updates that I can remember. 🤗
There were over 327 volunteer contributors, with about 109 individuals who contributed to WordPress core for the first time with this release (h/t Aaron Jorbin). 👏
Ella van Durpe noted on Twitter that only four out of the 60 noteworthy contributors on the WordPress 5.2 credit page are women. As part of the core team, Ella asked what she can do to help others contribute. A positive discussion ensued, and several people took her up on her offer. 🤝
Scott Arciszewski notes that WordPress 5.2 has improved signature verification for updates. Plugin developers can begin migrating their custom cryptography code away from mcrypt and towards libsodium.
Check out what Catalin Cimpanu at ZDNet has to say about 5.2’s security improvements as well.
Boone Gorges covers the changes to setup and usage of post globals in get_the_content() and related functions.
