The next release candidate for WordPress 6.0 is now available! 

WordPress 6.0 is scheduled for release on May 24th, 2022 – just two weeks from today.

“Release Candidate” means that this version of WordPress is ready for release! Since the WordPress ecosystem includes thousands of plugins and themes, it is important that everyone within the WordPress community check to see if anything was missed along the way. That means the project would love your help.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed towards testing and logging issues to help make WordPress 6.0 stable (and awesome). WordPress still needs your help testing, especially theme and plugin developers.

Since the RC1 release on May 3rd, 2022, there have been approximately 40 issues resolved in Gutenberg and Trac.

Installing RC2

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on a production or mission-critical website. Instead, it is recommended that you RC2 on a test server and site. 

You can test WordPress 6.0 RC2 in three ways:

• Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).

• Option 2: Direct download the release candidate version here (zip).

• Option 3: When using WP-CLI to upgrade from Beta 1, 2, 3, 4, or RC1 on a case-insensitive filesystem, please use the following command:wp core update --version=6.0-RC2

Additional information on the full 6.0 release cycle is available here.

Check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.0-related developer notes in the coming weeks, which will detail all upcoming changes.

Plugin and Theme Developers

All plugin and theme developers should test their respective extensions against WordPress 6.0 RC2 and update the “Tested up to” version in their readme file to 6.0. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post detailed information to the support forums so that these items can be investigated further prior to the final release date of May 24th.

Review the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide for more details on this release.

Translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages.

How to Help Test WordPress

Testing for issues is critical for stabilizing a release throughout its development. Testing is also a great way to contribute to WordPress. If you are new to testing, check out this detailed guide that will walk you through how to get started.

If you think you have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. This is also where you can find a list of known bugs.

An RC2 Haiku for You

AnticipationSprinting toward G/A nowPlease — test, translate — thanks!

Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @priethor.