WordPress issued a maintenance release on Wednesday evening to address problems identified shortly after WordPress 6.4 was made available to the public on Tuesday, November 7th.
Two of the issues were somewhat serious, affecting the operation of certain plugins and potentially causing problems for sites impacted by these issues.
The third issue was a typo that resulted in a misconfigured notice in the admin panel.
Three Issues Fixed
- Typo
- Removed code caused backward compatibility issues
- Critical bug causes download to fail
Typo In Code – Minor Cosmetic Issue
The typo issue was relatively minor. It affected how a nag screen appeared in the administrator panel, causing it to stretch across the top of the page.
Before the fix:
After the fix:
Backward Compatibility Bug
This bug was a result of core contributors removing code the WordPress core no longer used, assuming it was safe to remove. However, the code was still being utilized by plugins, causing them to break with the release of WP 6.4. The maintenance release reintroduced the removed code.
Critical Bug Causing cURL Error
The last fix addressed a bug that caused downloading updates to fail, showing an error message indicating that it timed out, cURL error 28: Operation timed out.
According to an internal WordPress discussion:
"This issue should be critical.
6.4 updated the Requests library version, which included a breaking change for anyone running on a host with curl version 7.29 (at least)."
This issue involved servers using an older version of the cURL library (cURL 7.29). The latest version of cURL is 8.4.0.
Takeaway
WordPress releases test versions for the community to identify and report errors. If no one experiences the issues during the test phase, they may appear when the final version is released, as was the case here.
The original WordPress 6.4 version that this maintenance release updates was named Shirley. The new maintenance release humorously begs to be named Don’t call me Shirley.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/photosince
