August 11, 2020
WordPress 5.5
August 11, 2020
WordPress 5.5 just dropped, and once again they have made a complete mess of image handling. Now every image is smeared out in the vertical direction.
My custom responsive theme does all the image sizing, and all my images are oversized, so basically I don't have to worry about image sizing at all. The downside is that, yes, it uses more bandwidth, but I don't care. Networks are constantly getting faster, bandwidth is a stupid thing to worry about - there is an infinite supply. Since my images are already over-sized, if I someday want to adapt the layout to new larger displays, I won't have to do anything with the hundreds of images in the site.
The new WordPress breaks all that. Fortunately, there is a simple css fix. Just add this to your css:
img{
max-width: 100%;
height: auto;
}
This css will override the width and height attributes that WordPress now insists on writing. Funny how that crufty old html is now back in vogue.
If you would like to disable the new 'lazy loading', add this to your functions.php:
add_filter( 'wp_lazy_loading_enabled', '__return_false' );
I wouldn't recommend that, since the css fix does the trick, and lazy loading is not a bad idea otherwise. WordPress seems to be trying to go in every direction at once with image handling, and the result is a real mess.
On the plus side, there are some nice new features. WordPress finally almost caught up to me with xml sitemaps. It can now generate them natively, so I disabled my code. However, there is still no search engine 'ping' functionality, so they still have a ways to go.
The automatic update of themes and plugins may or may not be a good thing. You really don't want to automatically install the new broken version of something. I turned it on to see how it works out. I keep the plugins to a minimum; so many of them are really not well written.
There are new features in the editor, again I'm not sure if that is good or bad. We'll see. But you can't hold back the tide, when WordPress updates, you just have to grit your teeth and bear it. And find fixes for their mistakes.
