WordPress 5.8 has been released, bringing some major changes that will affect almost every existing plugin, and I imagine it will break quite a few of them, mostly because of the new block-based replacement Widgets page.
Long story short, Dev4Press plugins are working fine with WordPress 5.8 for the most part. I have not found broken plugins during the recent testing, but there are few minor issues, mostly styling related to the new Widgets screen.
WordPress 5.8 Tatum has been released on July 20, 2021, and you can read more about all the included features in the official WordPress.org blog post here: https://wordpress.org/news/2021/07/tatum/.
I have not had time to do detailed testing of the new WordPress 5.8, but I will do that soon. And, from the limited time I used it, I understand what the idea was with the widgets replacement and unifying widgets, shortcodes into blocks to be used everywhere. Still, some things related to the implementation of the new Widgets screen are wrong, and it doesn’t take into account how widgets are actually used in WordPress.
Yes, you can install Classic Widgets plugin to undo the changes or do some other stuff to the same effect, but once again, a highly critical WordPress feature is included in the core with the potential to do a lot of damage.
Anyway, more on that later; for now, this post will address the compatibility of Dev4Press plugins with new WordPress. As I said, the good news is that everything works as expected for the most part. There are some issues, I will list here:
- Some elements of widgets interface mode might look differently, because block editor has some aggressive styling applied. This is not a big issue, and will be improved with regular updates to every plugin.
- Preview for some widgets might not work, because they require frontend context to generate the data, so you will get empty preview for the widget, but that is not fixable under any circumstance, becuase it can’t be done.
- Previews are inconsitent in the Customizer (in page widget shows content, Customizer widget preview does not), again caused by the lack of context, and again, that can’t be fixed.
If you notice actual issues with any of the widgets, that include broken Widgets page, errors logged related to widgets in any of Dev4Press plugins, please, open a new topic in the support forum, and clearly state the version of the plugin, widget causing the problem and if possible, the full error from the log.
The first plugin that will get a full update related to the new Widgets panel and updates to the styling and other elements for the (legacy) widgets will be GD Knowledge Base Pro, with upcoming version 5.0 next week.
