What is WordPress?
WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today. There’s nothing to install on your computer and you don’t need any special tools. You can update your website from anywhere that you have an Internet connection – even your smartphone. Best of all, WordPress is free in every sense of the word. It’s both free to use and free to modify. So, if you are the sort of person who likes to tinker with code, you can dig in and make WordPress do just about anything you want it to. Unlike other free website building tools, WordPress is completely portable. That means you can host your website anywhere and move it at any time.What’s New in WordPress 5.5.3?
WordPress 5.5.3 is now available.
This maintenance release fixes an issue introduced in WordPress 5.5.2 which makes it impossible to install WordPress on a brand new website that does not have a database connection configured. This release does not affect sites where a database connection is already configured, for example, via one-click installers or an existing
wp-config.php
file.
The WordPress core team has released an emergency release of WordPress 5.5.3, just one day after the release of version 5.5.2. This emergency release was done to remedy an issue introduced in WordPress 5.5.2 making it impossible to install WordPress on a brand new website without a database connection configured. In preparing for this emergency release, a second issue caused a number of sites to be erroneously updated to version 5.5.3-alpha.
According to the release notes, between approximately 15:30 and 16:00 UTC on October 30, the WordPress auto-update system updated some sites from version 5.5.2 to 5.5.3-alpha. This occurred because the WordPress Core team disabled the download of the 5.5.2 release in an attempt to prevent new users from using this version. By disabling the download for 5.5.2, the wordpress.org API returned the alpha version 5.5.3-alpha-49449 as the version to which WordPress should update.
An analysis of the 5.5.3-alpha-49449 release found little difference between the WordPress 5.5.2 release and WordPress 5.5.3-alpha-49449 as much of the core functionality is the same. No reported site functionality was lost due to the error. However, with that autoupdate, a number of additional Twenty- themes were installed along with the Akismet plugin.
To fix both issues, the Core team initially re-enabled download 5.5.2 to prevent sites from updating to the alpha version followed by the emergency release of WordPress 5.5.3 to address the issue which prevented new installations.