Jetpack 6.1: General Maintenance

Happy May and welcome to Jetpack 6.1. This month brings us another general maintenance release, so you won’t find any big surprises here, but there are still some important improvements to learn about.

The new things you’ll find in 6.1 are:

Privacy information links added

Jetpack’s position regarding its users and their visitors’ privacy has been enhanced in the process to make all of Automattic’s software GDPR-compliant.

You will now will see a footer on the “More Info” popover that appears next to each feature setting. These link to specific sections in our support docs describing privacy implications in the event you want to learn more about them.

Stats and Do Not Track changes

We now offer the users a way to have a clear map of the privacy implications of each Jetpack feature. We also introduced a new filter that will honor the Do Not Track feature for visitors that choose to take advantage of it.

Note that this only affects Jetpack’s own Stats feature and nothing else.

WordAds improvements

There are two improvements to the WordAds program to share this month. First, we’ve added support for the ads.txt file.

Second, we’ve introduced a new shortcode, [wordads], which allows you to include an ad inline on any given post or page content. This will give you even more flexibility in defining where your ads appear on your site.

Additional performance enhancements

There are a few bugfixes and enhancements in this release, but the main issues we tackled are the following:

• When a post transitions to publish, Jetpack used to add Publicize post meta to all posts, whether or not it was a Publicize-able post type. This has been adjusted.
• We removed the Sharing and Like display functionality from WooCommerce’s Cart, Checkout, and Account pages.
• Users running their site on PHP 7.2 were seeing notices on their logs related to language features that were updated with this latest release of PHP. These notices should now be addressed.

Full changelog and thanks

As always, you can read the full changelog and see what else we have improved in this release.

Install Jetpack on your site or upgrade to 6.1 today to experience the latest and greatest!

Thanks to all the contributors to this release:

Aaron Douglas, Alex Mills, Allen Snook, Anthony Bubel, Brandon Kraft, Daniel Walmsley, David Newman, Derek Smart, Eric Johnson, Egill R. Erlendsson, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, George Stephanis, Igor Zinovyev, Javi Alvarez, Jacopo Tomasone, Jason Johnston, Jeremy Herve, Jeff Bowen, Jeff Stieler, Joan Rho, Justin Shreve, Lance Willett, Michael D Adams,  Michael Turk, Miguel Lezama, Mikael Korpela, Mike Jolley, Niels Lange, Oscar Lopez, Peter Westwood, Rastislav Lamoš, RC Lations, Rob Landers, Rocco Tripaldi, Taegon Kim, Tugdual de Kerviler, Yaroslav Kukharuk, and Žiga Sancin.

Osk