After certain developers voiced concerns about the speed of development, the WordPress Hosting developers agreed to postpone the release of the next major edition of the popular content management system (CMS) until January 2022. 

“I believe there are some major red lights here indicating that certain things aren’t ready for 5.9…. Overall, it appears like we are pushing things in a risky way right now,” stated Addison Stavlo, a contributor to the Gutenberg editor for WordPress. 

WordPress 5.9 was supposed to be released in mid-December 2021. During the alpha release cycle, however, things did not go well, prompting core engineers to make significant adjustments. 

After much consideration, the core app developers determined that it was better to deal with the concerns now rather than later. 

“The 6.0 release isn’t expected until April 2022, which is far too long for the community to wait for the features.” After going through this list of concerns, the Core Editor team determined that the features could be released in 5.9 under the amended timetable. “The decision to postpone the 5.9 release was not taken lightly,” Mork says. 

5.9 is still under a feature freeze, and Mork emphasizes that the team will make use of the extra time to iron out the bugs and deliver 5.9 to a stable condition.