WordPress 5.1 is Out - Brings Site Health and More to Bloggers Everywhere

The latest version of WordPress is out for public use. This new version brings a long needed feature to the popular open source CMS, Site Health.

What is Site Health?

The new Site Health feature will start showing notices to administrators of sites that are running outdated versions of PHP, leading to potential security risks. It will also perform checks on new plugins to ensure that they are compatible with the existing version of PHP. If they are not, WordPress will prevent installation (and possible site breakage).

This is a big step in the right direction for WordPress and I'm hopeful that even more features are introduced to the Site Health feature as it matures.

Other improvements within this release include:

• Speed and performance improvements for the Gutenberg editor.
• Multisite metadata – 5.1 introduces a new database table to store metadata associated with sites and allows for the storage of arbitrary site data relevant in a multisite / network context.
• The Cron API has been updated with new functions to assist with returning data and includes new filters for modifying cron storage. Other changes in behavior affect cron spawning on servers running FastCGI and PHP-FPM versions 7.0.16 and above.
• WordPress 5.1 features a new JavaScript build option, following the large reorganisation of code that started in the 5.0 release.
• And more!

For a full list of improvements, see here: https://wordpress.org/support/wordpress-version/version-5-1/