WordPress 3.8.3 and 3.9

WordPress 3.8.3 was released two days ago. This was a very minor release, fixing a couple bugs in 3.8.2, and was automatically rolled out to anyone scheduled for minor updates at Lightning Base that night.

WordPress 3.9 was released today. This is a major update, with most changes coming to the post editor (on which this is being written right now). You can check out the WordPress.org blog post for details on the features. What most users will notice is that the editor is faster, with better support for images, copying from external sources, and includes audio and video playlists. There are also nice updates to make managing widgets and themes easier.

Should You Update? 3.8.3

We highly recommend everyone to update to WP 3.8.3. The previous version, 3.8.2, is a quite important security update – it should be installed as soon as possible, and if you’re going to update to 3.8.2 you may as well go straight to 3.8.3.

Should You Update? 3.9

WP 3.9 is a bit of a different story. The WordPress testing process has become better over the years and even major updates usually have relatively few issues. But I would be extremely surprised if at least some plugins/themes that customize the post editor don’t see any problems. If something like this exists on your site, waiting a week or so and checking this post for known issues  is worthwhile. You can also check the support area for the plugin/theme you are concerned about.

WordPress is also warning of potential issues with Masonry, if you have a theme that uses this. We can also expect to see problems with MySQL once service is updated to PHP 5.5. It will still be some time before we make that upgrade – that should not block anyone from upgrading to 3.9 right now.

We will be rolling out updates for 3.9 tonight. Most clients do not have automatic updates enabled for major updates. But if you do have this turned on, please be aware of the above potential issues. Our updater does take a backup immediately before update, in addition to our standard nightly backups, so it is never a problem to rollback if an update causes problems.

Rapid-Fire Updates

There have been many WP updates lately, which can happen when security releases (3.8.2) and bugfixes (3.8.3) happen near a planned major release. If it’s too much to keep up with, you might consider setting up with our automatic minor updates at a minimum, or even major updates if you have a relatively simple site. We can also provide automated theme/plugin updates if that is something helpful for your installs.

If you have any questions, please visit our client area and open up a ticket, or fill out our contact form if you’re not yet a client.

Author : Chris Piepho

Chris is the founder of Lightning Base. You'll find him all over around here - writing on this blog, providing customer service, and handling whatever else needs to be done. You can reach him easily by filling out our contact form and addressing your message to Chris.