WordPress 5.5 Beta 2 is now available!

This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.

You can test WordPress 5.5 beta 2 in two ways:

• Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “bleeding edge nightlies” option)
• Or download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August 11th, 2020, and we need your help to get there!

Thank you to all of the contributors that tested the beta 1 development release and provided feedback. Testing for bugs is an important part of polishing each release and a great way to contribute to WordPress. Here are some of the changes since beta 1 to pay close attention to while testing.

Some highlights

Since beta 1, 48 bugs have been fixed. Here is a summary of a few changes included in beta 2:

• 19 additional bugs have been fixed in the block editor (see #23903 and #23905).
• The Dashicons icon font has been updated (see #49913).
• Broken widgets stemming from changes in Beta 1 have been fixed (see #50609).
• Query handling when counting revisions has been improved (see #34560).
• An alternate, expanded view was added for wp_list_table (see #49715).
• Some adjustments were made to the handling of default terms for custom taxonomies (see #43517)

Several updates have been made to the block editor. For details, see #23903 and #23905.

Developer notes

WordPress 5.5 has lots of refinements to polish the developer experience. To keep up, subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog and pay special attention to the developers’ notes for updates on those and other changes that could affect your products.

How to Help

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages!

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.