The WordPress project recently released WordPress 4.9, “Tipton” — a new major release named in honor of musician and band leader Billy Tipton. Read on to find out more about this and other interesting news from around the WordPress world in November. WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” On November 16, WordPress 4.9 was released with new features for publishers and developers alike. Release highlights include design locking, scheduling, and previews in the Customizer, an even more secure and usable code editing experience, a new gallery widget, and text widget improvements. The follow up security and maintenance, v4.9.1, has now been released to tighten up the security of WordPress as a whole. To get inv

WordPress 4.9.1 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release for all versions since WordPress 3.7. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately. WordPress versions 4.9 and earlier are affected by four security issues which could potentially be exploited as part of a multi-vector attack. As part of the core team's ongoing commitment to security hardening, the following fixes have been implemented in 4.9.1: Use a properly generated hash for the newbloguser key instead of a determinate substring. Add escaping to the language attributes used on html elements. Ensure the attributes of enclosures are correctly escaped in RSS and Atom feeds. Remove the ability to

WordPress 4.9 Beta 2 is now available! This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.9, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip). For more information on what’s new in 4.9, check out the Beta 1 blog post. Since then, we’ve made 70 changes in Beta 2. Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages! If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfor

WordPress 4.9 Beta 3 is now available! This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.9, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip). For more information on what’s new in 4.9, check out the Beta 1 blog post. Since the Beta 1 release, we’ve made 70 changes in Beta 2 and 92 changes in Beta 3. A few of these newest changes to take note of in particular: The plugin/theme editors now show files in a scrollable expandable tree list. See #24048. Backwards compatibility has been improved for M

It’s time for the aual WordPress user and developer survey! If you’re a WordPress user, developer, or business owner, then we want your feedback. Just like previous years, we’ll share the data at the upcoming WordCamp US (WCUS). It only takes a few minutes to fill out the survey, which will provide an overview of how people use WordPress. WordCamp US in Nashville The State of the Word includes stats and an overview of what's new in WordPress and is given every year at WCUS. Don't forget that tickets are available now so you can join the excitement in Nashville this year!

WordPress 4.8.3 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately. WordPress versions 4.8.2 and earlier are affected by an issue where $wpdb->prepare() can create unexpected and unsafe queries leading to potential SQL injection (SQLi). WordPress core is not directly vulnerable to this issue, but we’ve added hardening to prevent plugins and themes from accidentally causing a vulnerability. Reported by Anthony Ferrara. This release includes a change in behaviour for the esc_sql() function. Most developers will not be affected by this change, you can read more details in the developer note. Thank you to the r

While this month we focused on building new features for WordPress core, we advanced other areas of the project too. Read on to lea more about what the WordPress project accomplished during the month of October. Take the 2017 Aual WordPress User Survey The aual WordPress User Survey is a great opportunity for you to provide your feedback about how you use WordPress. This year is no exception, as the 2017 WordPress User Survey is out now. The information collected in the survey is used to make informed decisions about improvements across the WordPress project, so your answers are incredibly valuable and help shape the future of the platform. WordPress 4.8.3 Security Release At the end