WordPress 5.1 Beta 3 is now available!

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.

There are two ways to test the WordPress 5.1 beta: try the WordPress Beta Testerplugin (you’ll want to select the “bleeding edge nightlies” option), or you can download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 5.1 is slated for release on February 21, and we need your help to get there!

Site Health Check

One of the features originally slated for WordPress 5.1—the PHP error protection handler—will target WordPress 5.2 instead. Some potential security issues were discovered in the implementation: rather than risk releasing insecure code, the team decided to pull it out of WordPress 5.1. The work in #46130 is showing good progress towards addressing the security concerns, if you’d like to follow development progress on this feature.

Additional Changes

A handful of smaller bugs have also been fixed in this release, including:

  • TinyMCE has been upgraded to version 4.9.2 (#46094).
  • The block editor has had a couple of bugs fixed (#46137).
  • A few differences in behaviour between the classic block and the classic editor have been fixed (#46062, #46071, #46085).
  • When adding rel attributes to links, ensure the value isn’t empty (#45352), and that it works as expected with customizer changesets (#45292).

Developer Notes

WordPress 5.1 has many changes aimed at polishing the developer experience. To keep you informed, we publish developers’ notes on the Make WordPress Core blog throughout the release cycle. Subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog for updates over the coming weeks, detailing other changes in 5.1 that you should be aware of.

How to Help

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages! The beta 2 release also marks the soft string freeze point of the 5.1 release schedule.

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.

In just a few weeks
WordPress Five-One will be here.
Your testing helps us!