Jetpack 5.9: General Maintenance

Today’s release of Jetpack 5.9 includes some general maintenance items, many of which are included due to feedback received after the release of our search and Lazy Loading Images features in 5.8. You probably won’t find anything surprising in the list below, but it’s still worth a read to see what we’ve improved!

Here’s everything you’ll find in 5.9:

Improving the behavior of Jetpack Search

We received some great feedback about the Elasticsearch-powered search feature in our Professional plans that helped us make some important changes to its behavior in this release.

First, we’ll now implicitly activate this feature when the Jetpack Search Widget gets added to a sidebar. Also, the link from the Jetpack Search settings card will now properly direct you to the Widgets section in the customizer, so it’ll be easier to add and customize your search widget.

Another change we’ve introduced: any active Jetpack Search widgets will be moved to the inactive list if you disable the search feature.

Adding a filter to the Lazy Loading Images feature

We now allow images to be ignored by the Lazy Loading Images feature (introduced in 5.8) if they contain a reserved class name — by default, skip-lazy, or a custom one you define via the new jetpack_lazy_images_blacklisted_classes filter.

To use this on your site, apply the like skip-lazy class to a post or page with images, and verify that they do not load in a deferred fashion when visiting the content from the frontend.

Signing out from the WordPress.com Toolbar no longer logs you out of WordPress.com

Previously, when your site had the WordPress.com Toolbar enabled and you signed out of your site, you would also be signed out of WordPress.com. This would potentially create a strange experience if you just were trying to sign out to your site in order to perform testing.

With Jetpack 5.9, if you sign out from the toolbar, you will only be logged out of your site — not WordPress.com. You will still be able to configure Jetpack from WordPress.com if you wish to.

Additional performance enhancements

Finally, here are a few additional changes you may want to be aware of:

• We improved the way we handle characters for the minor conditions dropdown of the Widget Visibility section. For example, categories containing names with an ampersand will now be properly shown.
• We added support for excerpts to the Portfolio and Testimonial custom post types.
• A new filter, jetpack_twitter_image_default, was added to allow themes and plugins to customize twitter:image when no suitable image is found automatically.
• We removed an error that would occasionally appear when attempting to connect a site after clicking the Jetpack banner in the WordPress Dashboard.

Full changelog and thanks

As always, the changelog provides the full list of updates and changes in this release. If you have questions or feedback, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

Install Jetpack on your site or upgrade to 5.9 today to try out the latest improvements!

Thank you to the contributors to this release:

Alex Mills, Anna Magdalena Kedzierska, Ben Lowery, Bernie Reiter, Brandon Kraft, Daniel Walmsley, Derek Smart, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, Greg Ichneumon Brown, Igor Zinovyev, James Nylen, Jeff Bowen, Jeff Golenski, Jeremy Herve, Jonny Harris, Marin Atanasov, Matt Wiebe, Michael Turk, Miguel Lezama, Mikael Korpela, Nicole Kohler, Oscar Lopez, Paul Sealock, Rebecca Hum, Richard Muscat, Rob Landers, Robert Elliott, Rocco Tripaldi, Ryan Barrett, Steven Lin, Stephen Edgar, Umang Vaghela, Yaroslav Kukharuk and Žiga Sancin.

Nicole Kohler

Writer, nerd, and petter of dogs. Defender of the Oxford comma. Eater of sushi and lover of the color yellow. She/her.