Wordpress 6.8 Released April 2025

[universal4]

Wordpress just release the 6.8 version.

I have not seen any issues with it so far, but will take a wait and see attitude before making a decision whether this will cause problems on many sites.

It came with some security updates so I did want to give it a go to see if there were reasons to delay a rollout.

I see that it does rehash the passwords in the database after the update on the next login, and seems to be working fine.

I do not completely understand how the new "speculative loading" will work, but Knsta has a writeup on how this functions here.
https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-6-8/

Have not dug in to this to see is this is a straightforward implementation or wonder if there will be plugins released to help make this a smoother process. It appears developers can manipulate choices on what the assumed pages or data will be in the prefetch list.

Would be interesting to see if anyone has studied the "speculative rules" api and is using it, and whether they might have experienced speed increases using it.

Kinda looks like only Chrome, Edge and browsers built on the chromium based browsers handle all of this. There was an interesting chart posted here at Mozilla on which of the main functions work on which browsers. Interesting this article is at mozilla and they don't support much of it at all LOL. (chart near bottom)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...tion_Rules_API

For those that like studying the api's the mozilla breakdown in the above article appears to cover it well.

Obviously anyone consider this update should back up the web folder and database in advance of running the update.

Rick
Universal4

[universal4]

Had something strange happen with the 6.8.1 update

Not sure how it happened, but somehow acf was disabled during the update.

That broke the site I was currently updating and it took a short time to figure out what had happened.

In fact the plugin list did not even have the acf listed, and I could not reinstall right away. I had to rename the original acf folder and then a reinstall of acf worked but I made sure I was installing the WP Engine acf and not any or the others. I have not been following the politics of what happened with wp engine and wp directly but it had started getting quite messy around 8 months ago.

Obviously be sure to backup before any updates and check everything after. Doesn't hurt to make sure acf or other plugins you need are enabled after the wp update.

Rick
Universal4

[wonderpunter]

yes i had problems with one of my sites and the acf.. so far havent been able to get it to work

[universal4]

Try the method I used of renaming the acf folder and then a reinstall, make sure you get the WP Engine one.

Rick
Universal4

[wonderpunter]

Thanks for the tip its working, it onmly affected one of my sites that is using a different acf plugin.. acf pro

[Alexxx]

I'm just starting to work with WordPress, so it's still relevant for me.