Call for Testing: Jetpack 11.6 Beta

Jetpack 11.6 is available now and the download link is available here.

Jetpack 11.6 will be deployed to VIP on Thursday, December 8, 2022*. The upgrade is expected to be performed at 17:00 UTC (1:00PM ET).

*This deployment date and time are subject to change if issues are discovered during testing of the Jetpack release.

A full list of changes is available in the commit log.

What is being added or changed?

Enhancements

  • Editor: adds an experimental editor extension that displays a placeholder blogging prompt when starting a new post.
  • Form Block: update design for Feedback table in WP Admin.
  • Form Block: add a new form variation and template for a Salesforce Lead form.
  • Form Block: enable editing placeholders on form input fields.
  • Form Block: feedback export function is now integrated with the feedback table filters
  • Form Block: move the ‘check for spam’ button to below the responses table on the feedback page in WP Admin.
  • Form Block: improve the styling and formatting of the form submission page after a form block is submitted.
  • Form Block: updates Form block placeholder to include pattern selection modal
  • Form Block: updates Form block to allow layout blocks
  • Form Block: updates URL validitity check
  • Pre-Publish Panel: split out the email subscribers & social followers count in the pre-publish panel.
  • SEO: add a ‘noindex’ checkbox for posts and pages.
  • SEO: add a per post/page HTML title option.
  • Stats: add stats option enable_calypso_stats to allow users to enable the new Calypso Stats experience
  • Stats: conditionally load the new Calypso Stats package
  • VideoPress: detect if the video has a vtt chapters file
  • VideoPress: adds VideoPress feedback link to the VideoPress block.
  • WordAds: add US Privacy support for additional states (Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia).

Improved compatibility

Improves compatibility with the Jetpack Protect standalone plugin.

Bug fixes

  • Dashboard: fixes issue where default icon would be empty
  • SSO: fix setting toggle inconsistency.
  • Stats: stop stats loading indefinitely when a hashtag exists
  • Widget Visibility: fix error with WooCommerce Product Categories block

What do I need to do?

We recommend the below:

  1. Installing the release on your non-production sites using these instructions.
  2. Running through the testing flows outlined in the Jetpack Testing Guide.

As you’re testing, there are a few things to keep in mind:

Questions?

If you have any questions, related to this release, please open a support ticket and we will be happy to assist.

New Feature: Download individual subsite database backup

Today we’re announcing greater flexibility and control when configuring data downloads from the VIP Dashboard for WordPress multisite applications. We’re excited to see how this helps your workflows in local development and data analysis.

Single Network Site Download

In March this year we announced our database download feature, allowing you to download the entire database backup for any WordPress site. We’ve seen many of you using this feature for everything from offservice backups to local development and data analysis. For our customers with WordPress multisite, in addition to downloading the entire site backup, you can now configure the download to include the tables for a particular network site.

This will allow you to isolate data from a single site for easier analysis, testing, and launch processes.

You can access the new controls by clicking on the “Configure Download” button. The subsequent modal which appears, will provide you an option to choose a network site.

Network site download configuration

Date Filter

Each day’s database backups are now grouped by dates in their boxes. These boxes are part of a carousel, which allows you to scroll horizontally in either direction to quickly view and interact with backups taken on a particular date. 

Selecting a target date will list all the backups from that date. 

Database backup filters

Learn more about downloading backups in our documentation.

We’d love to know what you think about this feature; please get in touch!

Customers using VaultPress

Many customers have been using VaultPress to download the data for one network site in a multisite. If this has been your use case, we encourage you to try this new Single Network Site Download instead. 

We will be releasing further feature improvements in the near future to make working with your data even more convenient, particularly for customers using our VIP Local Development Environment.

New Capabilities: My Organizations and User Settings Sidebar

My Organizations

my-organizations-panel-in-the-VIP-Dashboard
My Organizations panel in the VIP Dashboard

Users who have access to more than one organization will now be able to view a list of all their organizations in a centralized place in the “My Organizations” panel. This optimizes navigation for more context and orientation in a single view. 

Click on the “My Organizations” tab in the top black header to view the panel. For more information, please refer to our documentation.

User Settings Sidebar

user-settings-sidebar-in-the-VIP-Dashboard
User Settings sidebar in the VIP Dashboard

For quick access to your user and various settings, a simplified version of the “Settings” panel will be displayed on the left-hand side of the “My Applications”, “My Organizations”, and “Settings” panels.

Updated Release Process for VIP MU Plugins

We are excited to announce that we will be offering more transparency, predictability, and testability of the platform codebase. Below is the summary of the changes:

  • Production and staging releases for the VIP Platform Must Use Plugins only happen on Tuesdays. You are able to run the staging branch of the MU Plugins in non-production environments, allowing you to test your applications against our platform code ahead of the production release.
  • Beginning Nov 29, 2022 we will switch every “develop” environment to use the staging branch of MU plugins. 

Improved visibility and predictability for VIP MU plugins releases

VIP MU plugins is a codebase that integrates your WordPress applications in the WordPress VIP Platform, and it provides key scaling, security, and management functionality. 

To give you a greater ability to assess updates to our platform against your unique application code and ensure they will not have an impact on your business, we are changing the way updates are deployed across production and non-production environments.

Over the years we’ve been providing increasing levels of visibility into what is being implemented and when it will be deployed. In 2021, we introduced the VIP Changelog, a stream of all public changes released on the Platform. We also designated Tuesdays for all VIP MU plugin releases.

Every Tuesday, the previous week’s staging release is promoted to production, and a new staging release is made. 

Undisclosed security mitigations, critical hotfixes, Jetpack updates, and core releases are not subject to the MU plugins release schedule.

Staging releases on non-production environments

The updates we make to VIP MU plugins undergo rigorous internal testing before they are merged to the Staging branch and made available for customers. 

Every feature branch must pass 42 checks before it can be merged. We run core tests, MU plugins tests across every deployed WordPress version, linters, code coverage reports, end-to-end tests, and other benchmarks to keep track of code quality.

Though great effort is made by VIP to provide stable releases every week, it’s important for customers to be able to validate compatibility of the application and the platform codebases. That’s why on November 29, 2022, at least one `develop` (non-production) environment per application will be configured to use the staging branch of VIP MU plugins.

We recognize that everyone’s needs and workflows are different, and running non-production code may not be pertinent, so we made it easy to opt-in/opt-out any environment using the Software Management feature in the VIP Dashboard or using VIP-CLI.

Screenshot of updating the MU Plugins release branch via VIP Dashboard

# vip @<ID>.<ENV> config software update muplugins <staging|production>
VIP-CLI config software update muplugins execution example

Questions?

If you have any questions related to this update, please open a support ticket and we will be happy to assist.

New Feature: Plugin management and vulnerability scanning

When security vulnerabilities are published for a WordPress plugin, the VIP team is notified and often we will help mitigate severe issues behind the scenes in order to prevent exploitation across vulnerable sites. This is not always possible for every vulnerability, and these mitigations are only meant to be a temporary solution. The real solution to this problem is keeping plugins updated and patched.

With that goal in mind, you may have also noticed that we introduced a new security scanning feature a few months ago that contributes to site security by occasionally opening plugin update pull requests in the GitHub repositories when newly released severe vulnerabilities are found. One of the main downsides to this is the lack of visibility as not every plugin vulnerability has an available patch, so no pull request could be created.

Today, we’re happy to announce more visibility and control with this plugin vulnerability scanning. There is now a page in the VIP Dashboard, located at Codebase > Plugins, that lists the plugins installed on the environment along with any known security issues.

Along with displaying any found security vulnerabilities, you will also be able see if there are any updates available for the plugin. And whether there are any vulnerabilities or just an update available, this new feature also has the ability to create plugin update pull requests on demand. Simply click the “Create Pull Request” button, take a sip of your coffee, and then head over to GitHub where you can merge in the changes!

Read more information about Codebase Manager and this new plugins screen.

New Feature: Deployment validation with VIP-CLI

To help improve the reliability of deployments for Node.js applications, we have released a new VIP-CLI command that runs a suite of preflight checks against your local codebase. The VIP-CLI preflight check can create a local environment for testing with the same configuration as your VIP Platform Node.js environment.

Example screenshot of Harmonia feedback in VIP-CLI command output with a final test result reported as Passed

These preflight checks will validate your application and flag any issues that might prevent the application from building, deploying, or working as expected on the VIP Platform. This gives you the same functionality that was already available through GitHub Pull Requests comments, but with the ability to run it locally and on-demand. 

We would love to know what you think about it, including how you hope to use this new tool, and what we might be missing, so feel free to get in touch!

Learn more about the new Node.js deployment validation with VIP-CLI, and Node.js deployment validation in pull requests with Harmonia.

Call for Testing: Jetpack 11.5.1

Jetpack 11.5.1 is available now and the download link is available here.

Jetpack 11.5.1 will be deployed to VIP on Thursday, Nov 10, 2022*. The upgrade is expected to be performed at 17:00 UTC (1:00PM ET).

*This deployment date and time are subject to change if issues are discovered during testing of the Jetpack release.

A full list of changes is available in the commit log.

What is being added or changed?

Enhancements

  • Dashboard: add a new illustration for WooCommerce recommendation.
  • Dashboard: add connection widget for unconnected sites.
  • Dashboard: add Jetpack Search Free and Jetpack Social to My Products.
  • Dashboard: ensure Apps card is always displayed, regardless of whether promotions are active.
  • Form block: add Contact Form child blocks to the Block Library.
  • Form block: add default spacing attributes on all form variations.
  • Form block: change layout flex styles.
  • Form block: improve parent block selection when inner block is already selected.
  • Form block: move Contact Form child blocks to a new category and remove some Core blocks from the child blocks list.
  • Form block: remove duplicated contact form settings from the Contact Form block’s toolbar in favor of the sidebar.
  • Jetpack Social: display broken connections to user in editor.
  • Payment Button block: support a wider varity of layout options.
  • Payment Buttons block: add typography controls.
  • Publicize: make the pre-publish panel initially closed by default.
  • Social: show pre-publish panel if the site has connections enabled.
  • Stats: change mentions of “Site Stats” with “Jetpack Stats”.
  • Subscription block: don’t include Jetpack Social connections in subscriber count.
  • Subscription block: revert the subscription block subscriber count change.
  • Subscriptions: bold the display reader numbers in subscriptions panel instead of underlined.
  • VideoPress: change the toolbar text for the “Edit video” button on the VideoPress block to “Replace” to match the core video block’s toolbar.
  • VideoPress: move videopress/video transfrom from VideoPress plugin to Jetpack plugin

Improved compatibility

Contact Form Block: removed compatibility checks involving automatic deactivation of contact form functionality.

Bug fixes

  • Contact Form: display consent form field result in notification emails and feedback views.
  • Contact Form: remove overlay causing issues with the block inserter hover behavior.
  • CRM: Fix unmounted state updates in Form CRM integration
  • Form block: include spacing between Contact Form blocks to allow the block inserter to be shown on mouse hover.
  • Form block: prevent contact form from escaping valid URL characters in the redirect URL
  • Get Apps card: Iterate on link to jetpack.com/apps to ensure backwards compatibility and click-tracking
  • Payment Buttons block: fix payment-buttons font sizes taking precedence over the font sizes of contained button blocks.
  • Publicize Components: Fix the panel component refactor
  • Social: Ensure we have a user connection when loading the module
  • Firewall: prevent sites from crashing when updating Jetpack versions due to a missing generated file.

What do I need to do?

We recommend the below:

  1. Installing the release on your non-production sites using these instructions.
  2. Running through the testing flows outlined in the Jetpack Testing Guide.

As you’re testing, there are a few things to keep in mind:

Questions?

If you have any questions, related to this release, please open a support ticket and we will be happy to assist.

Now Available: WordPress 6.1

WordPress 6.1 has been released. In keeping with WordPress version numbering convention, 6.1 is a major release.

WordPress 6.1 will make the life of your content creators much easier. It offers a much improved block editor experience to make content creation both faster and less prone to error, especially when it comes to longer, more complex pages and posts.

Learn more about the highlights of WordPress 6.1.

For more details about this release (including specific changes), please see the announcement post and Field Guide.

Questions?

If you have any questions related to this release, please open a support ticket and we will be happy to assist.

WordPress Multilingual (WPML)

Please be advised that using older versions of either the WPML plugin (< 4.5.12) or the WPML String Translation plugin (< 3.2.3) will result in an incompatibility with WordPress 6.1. Please upgrade to the latest versions to receive the compatibility fixes.