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Justin Tadlock

WordPress 5.3 “Kirk” Released, Brings New Default Theme, Editor Improvements, and UI Tweaks

Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing a saxophone.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Credit: Heinrich Klaffs CC BY-SA 2.0

WordPress 5.3 “Kirk,” named in honor American jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk, is now available for download. The update includes a new default theme named Twenty Twenty, user interface improvements aimed at accessibility, and new block editor features.

This release saw contributions from 645 volunteers, which is the largest contributor group ever for a WordPress release.

The release was led by Matt Mullenweg, Francesca Marano, and David Baumwald. They were joined by the following contributors in supporting roles in getting version 5.3 released.

WordPress 5.2 had 84 million downloads before WordPress 5.3’s release.

The PHP native JSON extension is now required for any site running WordPress 5.3 or later. This should not be an issue for the majority of users because the extension has been bundled with PHP by default since 2006. WordPress will output an error and cancel the update procedure if it detects the extension is missing. Users who are unable to update will need to contact their web hosts to have the extension enabled.

Twenty Twenty: New Default Theme

Screenshot showcasing the Twenty Twenty default WordPress theme.
Screenshot of the Twenty Twenty WordPress theme.

WordPress is getting a fresh coat of paint. Anders Norén led the design team for the new Twenty Twenty theme, which was a fork of his original Chaplin theme.

The Twenty Twenty theme is completely geared toward creating content with the block editor with its bold and opinionated styling. It comes with a cover page template and has a custom color system designed to keep the site’s color contrast accessible.

Block Editor Features and Improvements

Screenshot of nesting other blocks within the Cover editor block.
Nesting any block inside the Cover block.

WordPress 5.3 includes features from the versions 5.4 – 6.5 of the Gutenberg plugin along with bug fixes and performance improvements from versions 6.6 and 6.7. For users who have not been running the plugin, they should see faster loading times and quicker responses from keystrokes.

WP Tavern has covered every major release of the Gutenberg plugin that will be bundled in WordPress 5.3, except Gutenberg 5.6. Catch up on any features you missed with the following articles.

Other Core Features

Work toward large image handling went into the update. Instead of checking file sizes, images larger than 2,560 pixels are scaled down and used as the “full” image size. This change makes large images web ready and will significantly decrease file sizes for many users who upload images without optimizing them beforehand. This is common with mobile phone uploads.

For those who prefer to maintain the original sizes of image uploads, which is sometimes the case with photography sites, grab the Disable “BIG Image” Threshold plugin.

The site health screen introduced in WordPress 5.2 has some user experience improvements, such as tweaking how the grading indicator works for clarity. WordPress site owners will also need to verify their admin email every six months. This feature is to help make sure site recovery emails are being sent to the right place when an error occurs. It also lays the groundwork for future features that may build upon it.

Developer Changes

Developers should read the full WordPress 5.3 field guide to make sure none of the changes affect their plugins or themes. Some of the changes include the following.

  • Full support for PHP 7.4.
  • Improved date/time handling.
  • Robots meta tag now used for discouraging search engines from listing a site.
  • New meta key comparison operators added.
  • Integers are no longer allowed for nav menu slugs.
  • wp_die() now allows custom HTML.
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32 responses to “WordPress 5.3 “Kirk” Released, Brings New Default Theme, Editor Improvements, and UI Tweaks”

  3. WordPress 5.3 appears to be a solid version, tightening the ship on a broad array of fronts.

    Many resisted WP 5.0, and many others who upgraded to 5.0+ are now using the Classic Editor plugin.

    If that’s you, listen up: WP 5.3 with the new and improved editor is your friend. Give it a fresh look; you won’t be disappointed.

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    • I tried it out (again). I still can’t drag and drop a sentence from one paragraph to another in the block editor, so I’m already back to the Classic Editor plugin. I won’t even consider switching until I can do that one simple thing.

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  5. Well I’m off to a good start… if I try and edit a Post or Page I get an error message: “The editor has encountered an unexpected error.” But only on one of my sites (so far).

    An afternoon of problem solving, deactivating plugins etc. awaits :-(

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  6. I thought something had gone wrong with the update when I saw those borders in the admin area…. no design subtlety at all. (I get that is the point, but we aren’t all impaired)

    However, as with all changes like this, I’ll give it a go for a few weeks and see if it still rankles, if so it’s easy enough to add tweaks to my custom admin style sheet. (or someone else will develop a plugin)

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  9. I always used the Gutenberg plugin, so I follow updates before they get into the core. As for the design update, I found it positive for usability, not beautiful, but clear.
    As for the new theme, I found it excellent, so much so that I use it on my site with the AMP plugin. I hope they release plugins that increase their features.

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  14. Some of my older permalinks with /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ are suddenly broken with 5.3.

    I was getting Google Search console warnings, probably my SEO score droped like a rock.

    Have rolled back to 5.2.x, the links work again.

    How can this even happen, are there no tests?

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    • Sound like this issue https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/48623

      The existing links, aren’t broken, but when you try to generate a link for some of existing posts it comes out wrong (which in turn might affects canonical tags and so on).

      This is caused by caused by date_default_timezone_set() calls to change default PHP timezone setting an a theme/plugin, which is something WordPress core doesn’t support.

      Counter-intuitively this was caused by work on preventing changing PHP timezone from breaking things, it’s just that improving it in one place made it break in adjacent one.

      In a nutshell – core still works fine under normal circumstances, but if you already had the issue then that broke things in different way in 5.3.

      This happened because core it unit tested under “normal” configuration and the issue is rare enough and affects few enough post that it was never reported during development and pre-release versions.

      There will be a unit test for generating permalinks breaking in this way now and there is proposal to check for this in Site Health tool.

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      • It appears that lots of plugins and themes are using this code in one form or the other.

        Why is there no “deprecated” notice at least a few month before such a breaking change?

        This change should be rolled back immediately, it probably affects millions of sites which did not even notice yet due to no monitoring at google or similar.

        A weird quote can beo found here, “For the context while we consider date_i18() legacy function now”, but there is not one word about that in Code Reference nor is there a doing_it_wrong migration hint or similar.

        Something went pretty wrong with this commit, sorry to say.

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      • It appears that lots of plugins and themes are using this code in one form or the other.

        It doesn’t. There are about 600 hundreds of plugins in official repo that do it, by my count (those not calling it with UTC argument, which is harmless). None of them are especially widely installed (100K active and less) and a lot of instances seem to be in externals SDKs. libraries, unit tests, and such.

        Why is there no “deprecated” notice at least a few month before such a breaking change?

        I am not sure what do you consider breaking change here. The problem with permalink was certainly unfortunate, unplanned, and will be fixed in patch release.

        While there were some changes to edge case behaviors in older Date/Time functions, the work was done with usual commitment to backwards compatibility and there are a lot of unit tests added to ensure that.

        This change should be rolled back immediately, it probably affects millions of sites which did not even notice yet due to no monitoring at google or similar.

        It is hard to estimate, but I would say millions is too pessimistic. There are no major plugins that break things in this way. And changing default timezone broke things long before 5.3, just not like this.

        A weird quote can beo found here, “For the context while we consider date_i18() legacy function now”, but there is not one word about that in Code Reference nor is there a doing_it_wrong migration hint or similar.

        To be clear “legacy” here does not signify a formal deprecation status, is signifies that a function is an old mess.

        date_i18n() is not formally deprecated and there is no hard immediate need to migrate from it, though that is certainly advisable due to problems inherent in its design (chiefly use of WP timestamp).

        Something went pretty wrong with this commit, sorry to say.

        Certainly did, I very much would have preferred that permalink breakage was caught before release.

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  16. A year on from the release of the Block Editor “Guttenberg”, and as much as its come along way and going in the right direction. Unfortunately, it’s still way off from replacing any page builders. Hopefully 2020 is the year for migration for a lot of businesses.

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