WP 5.4 latest news: RC 5 available since march 27th ....

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WP 5.4 latest news: Release Candidate 5 available since March 27 th... very close to final


this article belongs to the WP-news for the WP-community.

whats new: Release Candidate 5 available since March 27 th (Slack archive) (Zip download) - cf: https://make.wordpress.org/core/5-4/
note: If you want to dive deeper into 5.4, development is discussed at a weekly meeting in the #core Slack channel and occurs next at Mittwoch, 1. April 2020, 23:00 MESZ. Wish us luck!

# What’s Coming in WordPress 5.4 (Features and Screenshots): https://www.wpbeginner.com/news/whats-c ... reenshots/

# check the site for actual infos: https://make.wordpress.org/core/

Accessibility
On the 14 updates related to Accessibility in 5.4, you’ll want to particularly note changes to the WordPress Admin Bar, to the calendar and recent comments widgets, on the Menu screen, and bugs reported by the WPCampus accessibility report.

Block Editor
The block editor has continued its rapid iteration since WordPress 5.0. Now it has Gutenberg version 7.5 bundled with WordPress 5.4; that’s ten releases all bundled into WordPress 5.4 (versions 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 and 7.5)! Bug fixes and performance improvements from Gutenberg versions 7.6 will also be part of 5.4.
The WordPress 5.4 Beta 1 post highlights a lot of new features and improvements across these releases, though you’ll also want to note the impressive achievement of 14% loading-time reduction and 51% time-to-type reduction (for a particularly long post of ~36,000 words, ~1,000 blocks) since WordPress 5.3.
Below you’ll find details on two new blocks, button component updates, block collections, default fullscreen mode for new installs/devices, custom keyboard shortcuts, general block editor API updates, new block variations API, a new gradient theme API, markup and style-related changes, and a new @wordpress/create-block package for block scaffolding.


Customizer
On the 14 updates of the Customizer component, WordPress 5.4 improves accessibility of focused elements as a follow-up to WordPress 5.3 Admin CSS changes, adds documentation of existing Customizer functions and hooks, removes apple-touch-icon-precomposed deprecated meta tags, and improves Menu items selection logic. Please note that some unused Customizer classes are now formally deprecated:

Menus
On the 5 updates in the Menus component, WordPress 5.4 improves keyboard accessibility of the Menu items selection tab panel and streamlines the user interface. If your plugins add custom fields to menu items, you’ll want to update your code to use the new wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields hook:

Privacy
On the 15 updates in the Privacy component, you will want to specifically note:
Personal Data Export now includes Session Tokens, Community Events Location and Custom User Meta.
Personal Data Exports now include a JSON file and a Table of Contents
New filters for the headers of all Privacy-related emails
The privacy tables are improved for a cleaner interface
wp_get_user_request_data() function was replaced with wp_get_user_request() for better clarity


REST API
On the 22 updates related to the REST API, WordPress 5.4 now supports “OR” taxonomy relation parameter in Post Controller, adds selective link embedding and introduces some changes in the WP_REST_Server method. Read below for more details on these updates:


Shortcodes
On the 3 updates to the Shortcodes component, WordPress 5.4 introduces documentation improvements and a new function: apply_shortcodes. This function is an alias of do_shortcode, which is still supported.


Widgets
On the 9 updates to the Widgets component, WordPress 5.4 introduces accessibility and user interface enhancements on the Widgets Admin screen and changes in the Recent Comments and Calendar Widgets HTML markup.


Other Developer Updates
There are even more goodies in 5.4, like the new wp-env (a zero config tool for painless local WordPress environments), enhancements to favicon handling, better information about errors in wp_login_failed, a new site ID in multisite’s newblog_notify_siteadmin filter, a new TikTok video embed and removal of the CollegeHumor embed, storing the original URL of media attachments in _source_url post meta, improved accessibility by loading the Admin Bar with wp_body_open, avoiding duplicate IDs in the Recent Comments widget, a new parameter in the lostpassword_post action in retrieve_password(), theme headers supporting “Requires at least” and “Requires PHP” declarations, and the delete_posts capability won’t trigger PHP notices for custom post types. Read through the dev notes below to see details on all these changes coming in 5.4.

But Wait, There is More!
Over 198 bugs, 121 enhancements and feature requests, and 8 blessed tasks have been marked as fixed in WordPress 5.4. Some additional ones to highlight include:
head over to the page https://make.wordpress.org/core/

stay tuned - soon the release will be available…