WordPress 5.5 Beta 2 is out. The final release is expected to drop on August 11th, 2020 as planned. 📅
👉 Several tooling additions and improvements have gone into the WordPress 5.5 cycle. Developers should take note of the build and test tool updates.
The WordPress Coding Standards ruleset has been updated from version 2.1.1 to 2.3.0, and the recommended version of PHP specified in the readme.html file has been changed from 7.3 to 7.4.
WordPress 5.5 will include the final update to the Dashicons icon font in WordPress Core. Don’t worry: Dashicons isn’t going away. As Jonathan Desrosiers explains: “It will continue to be bundled with WordPress in future releases. However, requests to add new icons to the font will no longer be accepted.”
This isn’t a surprise; earlier this year Joen Asmussen announced the short road ahead for Dashicons on the Make WordPress Design blog.
It’s nice to see accessibility improvements to widgets outputting lists of links. New CSS styles for buttons with a disabled state are also coming. 🔘
There are also new and modified REST API endpoints for 5.5. An endpoint was introduced for editing image attachments in the media library, and other endpoints were introduced for managing plugins.
