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October has been a busy month with preparations for WordCamp US as well as the next major release of WordPress. Read on to find out about all that work and more.

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WordPress 5.2.4

On October 14, WordPress 5.2.4 was released as a security release fixing 6 security issues. The fixes were backported to earlier versions of WordPress as well, so they’re available for sites not yet upgraded to 5.2.

This kind of release is only possible because people report security issues responsibly so that the Core team can address them. You can find out more specific information about the fixes on the release documentation page.

Want to get involved in building WordPress Core? Follow the Core team blog, and join the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

WordPress Style Guide Proposal

Early in the month, the Design team proposed adding a style guide for the WordPress brand that can be used across all of WordPress.org and anywhere the brand is represented. Work then began on putting the style guide together, and the current iteration is now available for viewing.

Work on this style guide is ongoing, and the latest update allows it to support multiple languages so that it can be used by more people.

Want to get involved in contributing to this style guide? You can do so via the GitHub repo, as well as follow the Design team blog, and join the #design channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

WordPress 5.3

WordPress 5.3 has seen active development over the past month, with a release date set for November 12. You can download and test the release candidate to get a taste of what to expect—this is largely what final release will look like.

This is a big release with a number of exciting and important updates. Among them are significant changes to the look of the admin interface, enhancements to the block editor that will affect developers of themes and plugins, large improvements to the way that Core processes images, updates to cater for some functions specific to PHP 7.4, improvements to the Site Health feature, and many more improvements that are all documented in the WordPress 5.3 Field Guide.

In addition to these Core updates, the upcoming major release will also include the new default theme, Twenty Twenty.

Want to get involved in building WordPress Core? You can contribute by testing the upcoming release, as well as follow the Core team blog, and join the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

New Core Committers

Three new committers have been added to the WordPress Core organizational structure. Core committers are individuals who have direct access to the Core development code repositories in order to publish updates to the software.

The new committers are Ian Belanger (@ianbelanger), Timothy Jacobs (@timothyblynjacobs), and Joe Dolson (@joedolson). While Ian’s commit access is specifically for Core themes, both Timothy and Joe have full access to Core. This type of access is only given to individuals who have proved themselves with high-quality contributions and a deep understanding of how the WordPress project works.

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Further Reading:

• The Accessibility Team is looking for new team representatives for 2020.
• WordCamp US is happening on November 1-3 and is set to be the largest WordPress event in North America.
• WordCamp Asia, the first flagship event in the region, will be rolling out their next batch of ticket sales on November 1.
• Work continues on Gutenberg, with the latest update including significant updates to the Cover block and many other areas.
• The WordCamp Europe team have published an update about the Contributor Orientation tool they worked on earlier this year.
• The WordCamp US team has published the results of their Grow Your Meetup survey ahead of their 2019 event.
• The Theme Review Team is making plans to implement a curated page for displaying featured themes in the Theme Directory.

Have a story that we should include in the next “Month in WordPress” post? Please submit it here.