With the arrival of WordPress 6.8, a period of uncertainty opens regarding future major and minor releases, as no decisions have been made yet on the topic.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from April 14th to 20th, 2025.
Cecil Taylor is the jazz pianist chosen as the namesake for WordPress 6.8, Cecil—a release focused on refining some of the most frequently used tools, enhancing the Style Book, and improving compatibility with classic themes. The rest of the update includes many behind-the-scenes improvements, such as speculative loading, switching password encryption to the bcrypt standard, and numerous performance optimizations.
Interestingly, this release was preceded by an unexpected fourth release candidate to fix two minor issues.
From this point forward, there’s uncertainty about how minor releases will be managed, as they’ll now include not only bug fixes but also small new features that do not significantly impact the overall functionality of the current version. This decision has been met with opposition from most core contributors, as expressed across various social media platforms and community discussions.
As previously announced, regarding performance improvements, one of the most notable advancements is the introduction of speculative loading—a technique that anticipates which resources might be needed and preloads them in advance, providing users with a smoother browsing experience.
Significant enhancements have also been implemented in the block editor, frontend interactivity, block type registration, and query caching. Overall, version 6.8 includes 24 performance-related improvements: 1 new feature, 14 enhancements, and 9 bug fixes.
There are also improvements related to WP_Query aimed at optimizing performance, particularly for sites without persistent caching. The primary update is an optimization enabling queries with equivalent arguments—even if ordered differently—to share the same cache. This prevents identical queries from running multiple times during a single page load, reducing resource usage.
However, this enhancement might affect themes and plugins that use filters within WP_Query, especially if arrays are directly compared within the code.
On another note, bbPress 2.6.13 has been released to fix an incompatibility issue with WordPress 6.8 related to database calls.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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