WordPress 5.2 “Jaco” is here!

On May 7, WordPress announced its latest update, “Jaco”, named after the jazz musician Jaco Pastorius. WordPress 5.2 introduces updates to make the world’s most popular content management system even better.

Here’s a quick recap of what’s new.

Better site health

A site health feature was released with the 5.1 update. This feature is now enhanced with new pages to help debug configuration issues and additional space for adding detailed debugging information. Have a look under Tools > Site Health.

Better PHP error protection

You can now fix or manage potentially fatal errors for your website, such as the dreaded “white screen of death”. There is also a new recovery mode, allowing you to pause plugins or themes that cause errors on your site.

Better plugin compatibility

The frustrating issue of downloading a plugin that won’t work properly (or at all) with your site due to conflicting PHP versions has been solved. Now if a plugin requires a more advanced version of PHP than is on your site, the plugin will not activate, saving you many potential headaches.

Better user accessibility

Those of us with visual impairments will have an easier time navigating WordPress. Plugins that add custom icons to the admin bar have a new markup format to help screen readers tools accurately describe the interface.

Better Building with Javascript

Writing modern Javascript in WordPress is made significantly easier with the addition of webpack and Babel configurations. Now you won’t need to set up these complex build tools; they are built into WordPress.

These are only a few of the 59 enhancements ‘Jaco’ offers to jazz up your WordPress experience, so update today to benefit from these improvements!

How to Update WordPress to 5.2

If you’re running on our Managed WordPress Hosting and you haven’t disabled automatic upgrades, your WordPress should update automatically without needing to do anything.

Otherwise, WordPress can manually be updated from its dashboard or your control panel by following the simple instructions in our Help article.

Happy WordPress’ing,