As many of you might have noticed, this week we had two updates to WordPress from 4.9.2 to 4.9.3 and then in less than 24 hours 4.9.4 was rushed out. Why did we have two updates back to back?
WordPress 4.9.3
This update resolved 34 bugs in WordPress 4.9 including fixes for the Customizer, widgets, visual editor and support for PHP 7.2. This was a Maintenance Update which is what makes WordPress such a great CMS to use for nearly every website. Having such an active team working around the clock making sure things work properly and are secure, is priceless. In fact, if we were to try and hire a team to replicate this type of continuous development, we would be spending six figures per month.
So why was there another update so quickly?
WordPress 4.9.4
Like any big project or platform, with millions of lines of code, bugs will creep in. This is true for MacOS, iOS, Windows, Android and of course WordPress. There are bugs in literally every platform that exists. Some are known and being worked on (hopefully) others are unknown and will eventually be discovered.
When WordPress 4.9.3 was released, a few hours later, a single bug was discovered that impacted a WordPress Website future auto updates from taking place. So this was considered to be a big enough bug to rush out a patch.
The ability to have your website auto update is important since it helps improve security and usability. Both are extremely important and WordPress takes this seriously.
The issue was literally just a few lines of code in one file. In the video above I show you the code and talk about how you can see the changes made in any file or folder by using a free tool called Meld Merge.
Watch the video and see what the code changes looked like. Also, make sure to update your WordPress Powered Websites ASAP.