The first release candidate for WordPress 5.8 is now available! 
Join us in celebrating this major milestone for the community as we work toward the final WordPress 5.8 release!
A "release candidate" means the new version is ready for launch, but given the thousands of plugins and themes, and the varied ways millions of people use WordPress, some oversights may still exist. WordPress 5.8 is scheduled to launch on July 20, 2021, but we need your help to hit this target – if you haven’t tried 5.8 yet, now is the time!
You can test the WordPress 5.8 release candidate in three ways:
- Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the
Bleeding edgechannel, then theBeta/RC Onlyupdate stream) - Download the release candidate directly (zip)
- Test using WP-CLI:
wp core update --version=5.8-RC1
Thank you to all contributors who have tested the beta releases and provided feedback. Testing for bugs is a critical step in polishing every release, and an easy way to contribute to WordPress.
What’s New in WordPress 5.8?
WordPress 5.8, the second major release of 2021, continues to make progress on the block editor toward the promised future goal of full site editing, with the following updates:
- Widget management via blocks
- Display posts with new blocks and block patterns
- Edit post templates
- Page structure overview
- Recommended block patterns
- Image styles and color options
theme.json- Dropped support for IE11
- Added WebP image support
- Additional block support
- Gutenberg 10.7 plugin release
WordPress 5.8 also includes numerous improvements to the developer experience. To learn more, subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog and follow the developer notes tag regularly for updates on these and other changes that may impact your projects.
Plugin and Theme Developers
Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.8, and update the Tested up to version in your readme files to 5.8. If you find compatibility issues, be sure to post in the support forums so we can resolve them before the final release.
An in-depth guide to the upcoming WordPress 5.8 release will give you a deeper breakdown of the key changes.
How to Help
Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into over 100 languages! This release also marks the string hard freeze for the 5.8 release cycle.
If you find a bug, you can post in the Alpha/Beta section of the support forums. We’d love to hear your feedback! If you are able to write a reproducible bug report, please submit a report on WordPress Trac, where you can also find the list of known bugs.
Thank you to @audrasjb, @cbringmann, @webcommsat, and @pbiron for their draft suggestions and final review.
This is a split discussion thread from the original post at https://cn.wordpress.org/2021/06/30/wordpress-5-8-release-candidate/