WordPress released a maintenance release on Wednesday evening to fix problems discovered shortly after WordPress 6.4 was released to the public on Tuesday November 7th.
Two of issues were somewhat serious in that they affected the operation of certain plugins and could cause issues for sites encountering either of the two problems.
The third one was a typo that resulted in a misconfigured notice in the admin panel.
Three Issues Fixed
- Typo
- Removed code caused backward compatibility issues
- Critical bug causes download to fail
Typo In Code – Minor Cosmetic Issue
The typo issue was relatively minor. It affected how a nag screen appeared in the administrator panel, causing it to stretch across the top of the page.
Before the fix:
After the fix:
Backward Compatibility Bug
This bug was one of those random things that can’t always be accounted for.
What happened is that core contributors removed code that the WordPress core was no longer using, thus it was supposed to be safe to remove.
But… that code was still being used by plugins and because it was now missing, WP 6.4 was apparently causing those plugins to break.
So the fix that is in this maintenance release is to add it back in.
Critical Bug Causing cURL Error
The last fix was for a bug that caused downloading updates to fail and show an error message saying that it timed out, cURL error 28: Operation timed out.
According to the internal WordPress discussion of how to fix this:
“This issue should be critical.
6.4 updated the Requests library version which included a breaking change for anyone running on a host with curl version 7.29 (at least).”
This issue was also another one of those random things. In this case, it involved servers that were using an older and outdated version of the cURL library (cURL 7.29). The latest version of cURL is 8.4.0.
Takeaway
WordPress releases test versions of WordPress for the community to test and report back any errors.
But if nobody experiences them then they show up when the final version is released and that is what happened.
The original WordPress 6.4 version that this new maintenance release updates was codenamed Shirley.
The new maintenance release kind of begs to be codenamed Don’t call me Shirley.
