WordPress Digest #75: WordPress 5.2.2, 5.2.1, and some par-for-the-course WordPress Drama

This (mostly) bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land.

Release News

WordPress 5.2.2 is scheduled for release this week, on Tuesday, June 18. For a list of the bug fixes and stability improvements, check out the release candidate notes.
Since I’ve been lax on my updates, WordPress 5.2.1 also released in the interim since my last Digest. I’ve been busy, man…chill!
An XML Sitemaps feature project proposal has been submitted and I think it’s a great idea. There’s no reason this should be functionality relegated to plugin territory…it should come right out of the box.

Gutenberg 5.9 released recently. To be clear, this is the Gutenberg plugin, not the version of Gutenberg packaged with WordPress core. Lots of bug fixes and feature enhancements to sift through in this. Would be very nice if there was a roadmap outlined for when Gutenberg releases will be integrated into WordPress core (what versions, when, etc)…so far I haven’t been able to find anything like this in my digging.
The late Alex Mills’s plugins have been adopted by Automattic. This is great news as he was a prolific WordPress engineer and so many of his plugins became indispensable tools for other WordPress engineers and site admins. I have personally used his Regenerate Thumbnails plugin in every site I’ve ever developed.

WP Engine has released a set of dev tools, aptly named DevKit, to aid developers with local environment setup. Among other features, it promises push/pull deployments to WP Engine, and given the quirks I’ve experienced with WP Engine’s gitpush feature, I’d be very happy if this tool made that process better. It’s currently in open beta and available for free.
This is a bit of drama I haven’t really been following too closely, but Joost de Valk has stepped down as WordPress Marketing Lead, a post that was created pretty recently and awarded to de Valk. You want the really juicy shop talk? Check out the comments where various folks go to town about theories that WordPress is no longer open source and accusations that Matt Mullenweg has adopted a dictator-like role. I myself have been critical of Mullenweg in the past, but I definitely give him props for jumping into these comment threads to engage in constructive conversation.