WordPress 6.4. RC2 Released and Ready for Testing

WordPress 6.4 RC2 was released this week with more than 25 issues resolved since RC1. These include a few cherry-picked commits from the Gutenberg repository, additional closed Trac tickets since RC 1, and more than a dozen housekeeping commits for Twenty Twenty-Four.

The 6.4 Field Guide is now published with technical notes. It’s a lengthy document that collates all the dev notes for important changes that developers will want to review. A few examples include the following:

Improvements to Template Loading in WordPress 6.4

New option functions in 6.4

Image loading optimization enhancements in 6.4

Updates to the HTML API in 6.4

Framework for storing revisions of Post Meta in 6.4

In addition to these important updates to core, WordPress 6.4 will roll six Gutenberg releases into the core – 16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 16.6, 16.7.

The Documentation team is looking for volunteers to assist with updating and revising the End User Documentation on HelpHub. A 6.4 project board tracks the tasks in the Documentation repository on GitHub, and it has been sorted by priority. New documentation contributors are invited to join, and the onboarding process is well documented for getting started.

The emails have gone out to extension developers, who are encouraged to test against 6.4 and update the current “Tested up to” values for each extension.

One of the easiest ways to test the upcoming release is by using Playground: https://playground.wordpress.net/?wp=beta. The Playground environment can be further customized for different storage types, PHP versions, and the WordPress version.

A comprehensive 6.4 testing guide has been published with video demonstrations of how each of the key new features should behave. This makes it easy for testers to know if something is not working the way it should.

WordPress 6.4 is now under two weeks away from its scheduled release day of November 7, 2023.