Epic - Support for WP 6.8

[AmnestyAM]

Sprints allocated

Number of sprints: 1

Goals

• Update site to WP 6.8
• Check other branches - donate - APIv3

[carolinejcourtney]

@AmnestyAM do we have a list of what new features we plan to support from the update? Please loop @SophieAmnesty in on discussions. I'm gonna have a quick look at what's in the release and put in my two cents on what we might want to support. As part of this epic, we'll want to include updating documentation and comms to existing users on changes that are relevant to them.

[AmnestyAM]

Hi @carolinejcourtney there is nothing in this release that I feel we need to communicate with anyone out side the team.

https://wordpress.org/news/2025/04/cecil/
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2025/03/28/wordpress-6-8-field-guide/

There should be more exciting stuff in 6.9

[jaymcp]

I've scanned every Trac ticket in the 6.8, 6.8.1, and 6.8.2 milestones, and couldn't see anything that would impact us in any significant way. There were 2 new oEmbed providers added — Canva, and Screencast.com — but, because we filter out embed providers that we don't want folks to use (via the Branding plugin), they will not be available.

The only other thing of note is that password hashing is changing in 6.8. User passwords created prior to 6.8 will be auto-upgraded to the new algorithm upon first login after update. Which means that, if a user has logged in on 6.8, and a site is later downgraded to < 6.8, they'll need to reset their password.
I don't really think this is that significant, though; I've not yet found any difference after update that would warrant a downgrade. Further, it won't impact any of our sites that use SSO login.

I haven't yet scanned all of the Gutenberg-specific tickets yet, as there are 1,002 changes there (a11y, bugs. enhancements, 6.8.1, 6.8.2), but none appear to be major changes to functionality. I have scanned the 387 tickets marked as enhancements, though, but there's nothing of note in there either.