We are happy to announce that Wordpress 5.2 is ready to download. You will find a lot of bug fixes, improvements, and features. Let's take a look at them and learn how they are useful for your website.

New feature to check WordPress website condition

There is a new tool Site Health under Tools in your WordPress 5.2 dashboard. You can perform tests to check your website health and potential issues.

New feature to handle WSOD

This option allows fixing fatal errors by administrators that previously were impossible to fix without developer knowledge. This feature can help even if there is a White Screen of Death.

Changes in the Gutenberg block editor

Block Editor in Wordpress 5.2 now is more useful - you can use it independently from the post editor, ex. Appearance -> Widgets. There is no dependency to post object.

Accessibility changes for dashboard

There is better accessibility in WordPress 5.2 for the Archive Widget dropdown, Admin tabs, post formats in list tables, Admin Bar submenu link markup.

Privacy Policy - special template

Now you can add privacy-policy.php file to your theme so you can have a different layout for this kind of page. There is also new function is_privacy_policy to check for this page.

Dashboard icons

There is a new format for icons - WOFF 2.0. There are also 13 new icons. You can check all icons available in Wordpress 5.2: https://developer.wordpress.org/resource/dashicons/#share

wp_body_open function

This function triggers action wp_body_open. This method allows you to inject code just after opening BODY tag. This may be very useful to add some script or metadata.

Adjustments for login header

There are improvements for a redundant or useless title attribute. WordPress logo link in this view directs now always to WordPress.org.

Caption styles for the image editor

There are small improvements for styling elements: figcaption and block-editor-rich-text__editable. Margin and font-size have been changed.

Walker_Category - HTML attributes

category_list_link_attributes has been added to Walker_Category so now there is a possibility to customize category list items.

New filter to handle user content

Wordpress 5.2 adds users_have_additional_content filter so your plugin can check for custom content relationships. When user will be deleted we can remove also other data related to that user, not only posts or pages.

More and more fixes

Except for the listed items, WordPress 5.2 developers have fixed 228 bugs, ad  59 enhancements, and 3 feature requests. Good work :-)

Read the full list of improvements here.