A lot goes into a WordPress release. Md Shahjahan shared a retrospective analysis of the WordPress 6.8 release showing contributor stats. It is an interesting look at what it takes and the fact that it is a world-wide effort involving many people and companies.

This is info for plugin and theme developers: There were some changes in the 6.8 release to how core caches and uses WP_Query. The core team is suggesting developers check their code to see if they need to make any changes.

Speculative loading is now enabled in WordPress 6.8 by default, but this may require some tweaks such as using full-page HTML caching to avoid additional server load. Rob Marlbrough shares what it means for SEO and your site performance, and how to set it up on your site easily.

WordPress 6.8 is rolling out. I updated a dozen sites without issue. Also, I don’t see any 6.8 problem chatter on WP org. Here is the release post.

Core committers met a week ago to discuss the upcoming release schedule in light of there being fewer sponsored resources available. We now have a summary of that meeting. One of the outcomes is that WordPress 6.8 will be last major release for this year.

WordPress 6.8 is currently scheduled for release in about 3 weeks on April 15th. Despite it being a “maintenance” release, there are some nice enhancements. This overview of 6.8 has summaries of the new features.

Roger Montti at the Search Engine Journal reports on the Q&A session with Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Asia. Some of the answers seemed to reveal that there are no plans for WordPress other than Gutenberg.

Coming in WordPress 6.8 – The algorithm used for passwords is changing from phppass portable hashing to bcrypt.

Joost got more feedback on his blog than expected and ran into a problem with caching. This led him down a rabbit hole to understand how the WordPress comment system works and how he could make it work with his site caching.