A pre-release WordPress install killed a client’s publish button. The cause was a core bug in hidden async-upload fields, one of several things the 6.9 release candidates cleaned up alongside alternate cron and REST API errors.
A banned member was back in ten minutes on three new accounts, because a dynamic IP beats a firewall rule. What the site actually needed was an incident response protocol: logging, permissions, and a human who owns the ban button.
Fifty layers of function_exists() held a membership site together until the LMS renamed its methods. The Abilities API in 6.9 gives plugins a registry to declare what they can do instead.
A client pushed WordPress 6.9 RC3 to a live WooCommerce store and lost checkout inside ten minutes. What broke, why my first quick fix made it worse, and where release candidate testing actually belongs.
A magazine site moving off an emoji subdomain came apart under wp search-replace. WordPress Importer 0.9.5 rewrites URLs during the import instead, using the block markup parsers in core to tell a real URL from a lookalike string.
WordPress 6.9 ships live on stage during State of the Word on December 2. The timeline behind it, from the dry run 26 hours out to the T-30m handoff, is worth borrowing for your own launches.
An official WordPress GitHub repo is not a support promise. Roughly 20 repos were archived across the WordPress and bbPress orgs, which is a good reason to go looking for orphaned code in the sites you maintain.
A tiny patch to a custom gateway plugin broke checkout for about 15% of one store’s customers. Release Confirmation, tracked in #8009-meta, holds auto-updates back for 24 hours so a mistake like that stays small.
A client wanted their block plugin hosted under the WordPress GitHub organization and found the path opaque. Here are the actual criteria: community ownership, a sponsoring Make team, more than one maintainer, and what happens when maintenance stops.
A client’s store slowed to a crawl right after someone clicked update to WooCommerce 10.4. Here is what the release actually changes in the REST API, the Store API and the block editor, and which custom code you should review first.