Jetpack 6.6 was released today with an update to the Site Verification tools that enables one-click verification and sitemap.xml registration with Google.

This release also introduces the beta of Jetpack’s Asset CDN. The new module, built on the same infrastructure as the Photon CDN, speeds up sites by cloud-hosting widely-used Jetpack and core WordPress scripts, styles, and assets. It takes a load off of users’ servers and increases the allowed maximum concurrent connections through Photon. Once it is ready for use in production, the Asset CDN will be a new opt-in feature that can help speed up Jetpack’s 5+ million active installations.

Version 6.6 also adds the necessary infrastructure for new Gutenberg blocks. The activity on the plugin’s GitHub repository indicates the team is working on a number of blocks for existing features, including things like recipes, shortcodes, Jetpack subscription form, Simple Payments, Publicize, the contact form, tweet shortcode, VR shortcode, Giphy, and more. Everything touching the editor is in the process of being ported to blocks. Many of the blocks are already complete and some are still in progress. Some features, such as support for tiled gallery layouts, have bugs that need to be sorted before Jetpack will be ready for WordPress 5.0.

Jetpack 6.6.1 will be going out soon to address a bug with social icons that this release introduced. In the meantime, users can paste the CSS in this gist into Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS to provide a temporary fix.