Plesk announced the general availability of WordPress Toolkit v5.3. The latest release is focussing on fixing issues reported by customers, improving performance, and handling working with outdated PHP versions and PHP 8.
Updated wp-cli & PHP 8 Support
For the latest release, Plesk announced that the team explored the outdated wp-cli component used for managing many aspects of WordPress sites to support PHP 8. In WordPress Toolkit v53, the team has updated from version 1.4.0 to the latest available version 2.4.1, which finally allows WordPress Toolkit to manage sites working on PHP 8. However, PHP 8 support in the latest version is still kind of experimental.
According to the announcement, updating cp-cli also resulted in unfortunate consequences. Thus, WordPress Toolkit now cannot manage sites working on PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3. Now WordPress Toolkit identifies the websites using an unsupported version of PHP and displays corresponding information.
WordPress 5.6 has introduced new default settings for WordPress core auto-updates. Now, new installations are configured to automatically install both minor and major updates by default but existing WordPress installations updated to v5.6 will keep their previous auto-update settings. WordPress Toolkit now supports this change. When the user installs WordPress 5.6 or a newer version via WordPress Toolkit, the auto-update settings will be automatically set to “Both major and minor updates“, as opposed to “Only minor updates” option.