Two WordPress Security And Maintenance Releases, Versions 4.9.4 + 4.9.3

By Csaba, Miklós WP SERVICES 12 February 2018

On 6 February, 2018, WordPress 4.9.4 was released to the public. This maintenance release fixes a severe bug in 4.9.3, which will cause sites that support automatic background updates to fail to update automatically, and will require manual action to be updated to 4.9.4. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

Contact us if you require help with the manual update - we'll do it gladly for free.
Please share this info with anybody affected to help make them aware that they will need to do a manual update to get past version 4.9.3. On the long run, this may cause severe downtime and outage, with possible data losses.

WordPress 4.9.4 contains a single bug fix:

#43235 - WP Automatic Updates broken in 4.9.3.

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On 5 February, 2018, WordPress 4.9.3 was released to the public. This maintenance release fixes 34 bugs, including fixes for Customizer changesets, widgets, visual editor, and PHP 7.2 compatibility. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately. 34 bugs were fixed in WordPress 4.9.3. Particularly of note were:

Canonical URLs

#15397 - Redirect to the correct URL when the post date changes.

Code Editor

#42802 - Disable attr-value-double-quotes HTMLHint rule since too strict for user input.
#42586 - Add Ctrl/Cmd+F as aliases for persistent search for more intuitive behaviour.
#42850 - Replaces JSHint with esprima.

Customize

#42497 - Improve accuracy of message displayed when accessing Customizer with a changeset that is already published or trashed.
#42674 - Prevent showing SFTP theme installation notification in multisite when user cannot install themes.
#42655 - Use changeset-specific "locked" messages when branching is enabled.
#42975 - Prevent frontend previewing from causing a customization lock on the changeset.
#42686 - Let default status for Customizer be draft if user does not have capability to publish.
#42565 - Correct "Add Items" button reference in help text shown after creating a new menu.
#42450 - Ensure customize_autosaved requests only use revision of logged-in user.
#42991 - Include nav menu item for Home custom link in search results for "Home".
#42495 - Ensure media playlists get initialized after selective refresh; expose new wp.playlist.initialize() API.
#42658 - Ensure heartbeat keeps changeset locked when in branching mode.

#42693 - Don't send notifications for site or network admin email address change to the default 'admin_email' value.

Emoji

#42862 - Update Twemoji to 2.4.0.
#42862 - Update emoji base URL in _print_emoji_detection_script() and wp_staticize_emoji().

Media

#43088 - Restore white background of the content area in media modal.
#42643 - Introduce a custom error handler for MediaElement.js to display a download link if a FLV file cannot be rendered for any reason.
#42646 - Store and reuse image cropper ratio settings if available, instead of overwriting.
#42646 - Fix JSHint error after #42595.
#39859 - Avoid page scrolling when opening the media modal.

Plugins

#43016 - Update review filter links in Details modal.

REST API

#42597 - Add existing term_id to the error data object when attempting to create a duplicate term.

Role/Capability

#42697 - Make install_languages capability check less restrictive.

TinyMCE

#43090 - On the toolbar drop-downs apply overflow style on the actual element with text.
#42908 - When keeping the scroll position treat all shortcodes as preview-able.
#42722 - Backport bug fixes to NotificationManager, WindowManager and MultiRange.

Upgrade/Install

#43005 - In postMessage events handler, check for message object existence before checking its action property.
#43103 - Only trigger Background Update processes from within the core update check when a core autoupdate is on offer.

Widget

#43003 - Prevent checkValidity from running on a form when widget is first adding to sidebar.
#42740 - Allow relative/partial URLs in Image Widget's link field.
#43125 - Ensure media is explicitly enqueued from Text widget in case Media widgets are unregistered.

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