WordPress 6.8 Development Cycle

Dev Chat Agendas | Dev Chat Summaries | Roadmap post | Bug Scrubs Schedule | Dev Notes | Field Guide | Help Test 6.8 | All Posts Tagged 6.8 | 6.8 Release Leads Channel

WordPress 6.8 will be the first major release of 2025 and will focus primarily on being a polish and bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. fix release. New features will be considered if deemed reasonably ready.

Release Squad

• Release LeadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release.: Matt Mullenweg
• Release Coordination: Jeffrey Paul and Michelle Frechette
• Tech Leads: Joe McGill, Jonathan Desrosiers, and George Mamadashvili
• Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Lead: Jb Audras
• Design Lead: Tammie Lister
• Performance Lead: Felix Arntz
• Test Lead: Krupa Nanda

All release decisions will ultimately be this release team’s to make and communicate while gathering input from the community.

Release Schedule

For specific release times and roles, please reference the WordPress 6.8 Release Party Schedule.

November 21, 2024	6.8 Pre-planning post.
October 22, 2024	Alpha Begins. Trunktrunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision. is open for business.
March 4, 2025	Beta 1. From this point on, core contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org. will focus on testing and fixing bugs discovered during betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. testing. Begin writing Dev Notesdev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. and the About page (Slack archive, ZIP download).
March 11, 2025	Beta 2. Test the beta release, fix bugs discovered during beta testing, and continue writing Dev Notes and the About page (Slack archive, ZIP download).
March 18, 2025	Beta 3. Test the beta release, fix bugs discovered during beta testing, and continue writing Dev Notes and the About page (Slack archive, ZIP download).
March 25, 2025	Release Candidate 1. Publish the Field GuideField guide The field guide is a type of blogpost published on Make/Core during the release candidate phase of the WordPress release cycle. The field guide generally lists all the dev notes published during the beta cycle. This guide is linked in the about page of the corresponding version of WordPress, in the release post and in the HelpHub version page. with Dev Notes, commit the About page, begin drafting the release post, hard string freeze, and branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". for the release. (Slack archive, ZIP download).
April 1, 2025	Release Candidate 2. Update the About page images and continue drafting the release post (Slack archive, ZIP download).
April 8, 2025	Release Candidate 3. Update the About page images and continue drafting the release post (Slack archive, ZIP download).
April 14, 2025	Dry run for release of WordPress 6.8 and 24-hour code freeze (Slack archive).
April 14, 2024	Release Candidate 4. Update the About page images and continue drafting the release post (Slack archive, ZIP download).
April 15, 2025	WordPress 6.8 is released (SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. archive, ZIP download)!

How to contribute

To get involved in WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development, head over to TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress., and pick a 6.8 ticket. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook.

Get your patches done and submitted as soon as possible, then help find people to test the patches and leave feedback on the ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker.. Patches for enhancements will not be committed after the dates posted above so that we can all focus on squashing bugs and delivering the most bug-free WordPress ever 😉.

If you want to dive deeper into 6.8, join the weekly meetings in the #core Slack channel, which occur every Wednesday at 15:00 UTC.