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Things got off to a gradual start in 2018 with momentum starting to pick up over the course of the month. There were some notable developments in January, including a new point release and work being done on other important areas of the WordPress project.

WordPress 4.9.2 Security and Maintenance Release

On January 16, WordPress 4.9.2 was released to fix an important security issue with the media player, as well as a number of other smaller bugs. This release goes a long way to smoothing out the 4.9 release cycle with the next point release, v4.9.3, due in early February.

To get involved in building WordPress Core, jump into the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group, and follow the Core team blog.

Updated Plugin Directory Guidelines

At the end of 2017, the guidelines for the Plugin Directory received a significant update to make them clearer and expanded to address certain situations. This does not necessarily make these guidelines complete, but rather more user-friendly and practical; they govern how developers build plugins for the Plugin Directory, so they need to evolve with the global community that the Directory serves.

If you would like to contribute to these guidelines, you can make a pull request to the GitHub repository or email plugins@wordpress.org. You can also jump into the #pluginreview channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Further Reading:

• Near the end of last year a lot of work was put into improving the standards in the WordPress core codebase and now the entire platform is at nearly 100% compliance with the WordPress coding standards.
• Gutenberg, the new editor coming to WordPress core in the next major release, was updated to v2.1 this month with some great usability and technical improvements.
• The Global Community Team is taking suggestions for the goals of the Community program in 2018.
• WPCampus Online, a digital conference focused on WordPress in higher education, took place on January 30. The videos of the event sessions will be online soon.
• A WordPress community member has released a toolkit to help developers build blocks for Gutenberg.
• The community team that works to improve the WordPress hosting experience is relatively young, but they have been making some great progress recently.

If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please submit it here.