A pretty unfortunate and important issue happened when WordPress 4.9.3 was released a few days ago: it has an error that makes it impossible for WordPress to update itself again. After the error was understood, they stopped rolling out automatic updates. But that was after quite a few sites (speculatively: millions) had updated to it. That’s a problem. So, if you’re running 4.9.3 on any WordPress site, make sure that it (manually, perhaps) gets to WordPress 4.9.4. That’s crucial. Let’s explore why.

Eight years is a long time. It covers the period from birth to third grade, or an entire two-term US presidency. But, as I just learned, eight years has not yet been enough time to get a very simple fix to the way WordPress generates permalinks included into WordPress Core.

Speaking from personal experience: it’s hard to start contributing to WordPress Core. A few reasons why include:

This is cool: the WordPress core team is going start holding weekly meetings for people looking to get started contributing who aren’t sure how. This is a substantial roadblock, which was always one of my main excuses for not getting involved, so I think it’s a great step to make it easy for people who want to be involved by aren’t sure how.