As we are approaching November and WordPress team has announced releasing a new 5.3. version on November 12th, we have had a look at the Beta 2 released at the end of September. You could check an official overview here: https://wordpress.org/news/2019/09/wordpress-5-3-beta-1/ and here: https://wordpress.org/news/2019/09/wordpress-5-3-beta-2/. To be frank we have some mixed feelings, however, looking forward to seeing the final cut and give you a more detailed overview.

For now, here are Just some thoughts of our CTO:

1. Block Editor (Gutenberg plugin) –  looks like WordPress team is trying to develop a worthy competitor to Visual Composer, however, what we can see from our observation – our opinion is that Gutenberg is still not as popular as VC and yet not as good as the last one.

2. A new default theme: welcome Twenty Twenty – we would say that this is also kind of a questionable point. Usually, our clients don’t use default themes – they either buy more specific ones or decide to go with a custom theme based on design.

3. As for the admin part:

– Big Images are coming to WordPress – this change is again for Gutenberg as we understand it, this is something useful if you use this editor
– Automatic image rotation during upload – making UI fancier 😉 

3.3) Site Health Checks – this is a pig in a poke feature. Maybe something useful, maybe not.

3.4) Admin Email Verification – this is also kind of a questionable feature when there are many existing plugins that do similar functions.
4. And of course supporting PHP 7.4 – this will definitely help to win some loading speed! However, the question is how fast the most important plugins will be optimized to PHP 7.4.

Anyway, looking forward to the official release and after testing we will provide you with some more feedback from our team!