Call for Testing: WordPress 4.9.8 RC

Update (2018-07-31 1700 UTC): The core release for 4.9.8 has been pushed to Thursday, August 2.

WordPress 4.9.8, a maintenance release, is due to be released Tuesday, July 31, 2018. A release candidate is available for testing now.

What’s New?

The main features of the release are:

• Gutenberg (VIP Go only): Introduces a “Try Gutenberg” callout – a promotion for Gutenberg on your site’s dashboard (this does not appear if you already have Gutenberg installed)
• Emoji: Update Twemoji to 11.0
• TinyMCE: Updates to v4.7.13 (as noted below, WordPress.com sites will receive this update on Thursday, July 26).

In addition to the above, 4.9.8 contains 41 fixes and enhancements, including:

• Performance: Extreme memory leak related to wp_is_stream in wp-includes/functions.php in WordPress 4.9.7
• REST API: Attachments controller should respect “Max upload file size” and “Site upload space” in multisite
• REST API: Only render fields specific to request when _fields= is used
• REST API: Expose revision count and last revision ID on Post response
• Privacy: Don’t replace comment author URL and email with anything
• Privacy: Inconsistent use of blogname and sitename in Privacy emails

When is this being deployed?

WordPress.com VIP sites will receive the changes in two phases:

1. Thursday, July 26: TinyMCE update.
2. Tuesday, July 31: All other changes.

VIP Go sites will receive the update on Tuesday, July 31 Thursday, August 2 (the same date as the public release).

We’ll follow-up with additional Lobby posts once the updates have been deployed.

What do I need to do?

We highly recommend updating your local development environments to the release candidate using the Beta Tester plugin or updating it to track the 4.9 branch via either the Subversion or GitHub repos.

What if I need more information?

More information about this release can be found in the official announcement post about the release candidate. And always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.