A Little Better Every Day

Version 5.1 of WordPress, named “Betty” in honour of acclaimed jazz vocalist Betty Carter, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard.

Following WordPress 5.0 — a major release which introduced the new block editor — 5.1 focuses on polish, in particular by improving the overall performance of the editor. In addition, this release paves the way for a better, faster, and more secure WordPress with some essential tools for site administrators and developers.

Site Health

With security and speed in mind, this release introduces WordPress’s first Site Health features. WordPress will start showing notices to administrators of sites that run long-outdated versions of PHP, which is the programming language that powers WordPress.

When you install new plugins, WordPress’s Site Health features will check them against the version of PHP you’re running. If the plugin requires a version that won’t work with your site, WordPress will keep you from installing that plugin.

Editor Performance

Introduced in WordPress 5.0, the new block editor continues to improve. Most significantly, WordPress 5.1 includes solid performance improvements within the editor. The editor should feel a little quicker to start, and typing should feel smoother.

Expect more performance improvements in the next couple of releases.

Developer Happiness

5.1 introduces a new database table to store metadata associated with sites and allows for the storage of arbitrary site data relevant in a multisite / network context.

The Cron API has been updated with new functions to assist with returning data and includes new filters for modifying cron storage. Other changes in behavior affect cron spawning on servers running FastCGI and PHP-FPM versions 7.0.16 and above.

WordPress 5.1 features a new JavaScript build option, following the large reorganisation of code that started in the 5.0 release.

Miscellaneous improvements include:

Updates to values for the WP_DEBUG_LOG constant

constant New test config file constant in the test suite, new plugin action hooks

Short-circuit filters for wp_unique_post_slug() , WP_User_Query , and count_users()

, , and A new human_readable_duration function

function Improved taxonomy metabox sanitization

Limited LIKE support for meta keys when using WP_Meta_Query

support for meta keys when using A new “doing it wrong” notice when registering REST API endpoints

…and more!

The Squad

This release was led by Matt Mullenweg, along with Gary Pendergast as Senior Code Reshuffler and Poet. They received wonderful assistance from the following 561 contributors for this release, 231 of whom were making their first ever contribution! Pull up some Betty Carter on your music service of choice, and check out some of their profiles:

Finally, thanks to all the community translators who worked on WordPress 5.1. Their efforts bring WordPress 5.1 fully translated to 34 languages at release time, with more on the way.

If you want to follow along or help out, check out Make WordPress and our core development blog.

Thanks for choosing WordPress!

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