WordPress 5.5 came out on August 11, 2020 with a major change that broke plugins and themes of most WordPress sites.  We don’t want to bore you with the details, but here’s the short of it.

WordPress has decided to stop supporting old jQuery code.  jQuery is essential to the function of WordPress, but the code for jQuery has changed drastically over the years.  For security and performance reasons, it’s important to move on from the older code to newer, better code.  However, some themes and plugins are still using the older jQuery code including the classic WordPress editor.  One of the major problems we’ve seen is that the Add Media button doesn’t work nor does the Text/Visual tabs on the classic WordPress editor.

The good news is that WordPress is doing a phased approach to getting rid of support for older jQuery code.  We are in the first phase. In older versions of WordPress, jQuery Migrate Helper was packaged with the core files and enabled by default.  WordPress 5.5 stopped packing this with the core files and made it a plugin instead.  In order to fix the issues that WordPress 5.5 has introduced, WordPress has issued a plugin called the jQuery Migrate Helper.

We have taken care of installing and enabling this plugin for all our D3 Solutions clients who host with us.

But now, you may be seeing a few warnings on the backend of your website that are alarming you.  Below are a few on the D3 Solutions website.

But before you panic, these warnings are important.  They publicly shame (just kidding) the plugin and theme makers into making the necessary adjustments to their code to stop using outdated jQuery code.  As you can see in the above screenshot, our website has some outdated code in the theme we’re using.  The theme and plugin makers have until sometime in 2021 when WordPress 5.7 is released to make their changes, but until then, this notifies them that they have some re-coding to do.

What can you do?

Be patient and don’t panic.  For those clients who host with us, as updates are coming out, we are applying those updates and hopefully, you’ll see less warnings about outdated code.  However, if it becomes apparent that the theme or plugin is no longer supported by the makers, we may need to talk about reworking parts of the site that use that plugin so we can get rid of the plugin or rebuilding your site on a different theme.  But we’ll cross that bridge as it becomes apparent that it’s needed.

In the meantime, don’t disable the jQuery Migrate Helper.  Feel free to click the grey circle with the white X in the top, right corner to dismiss the warning if it bothers you.  There is no reason to believe that these changes will bring your site down, unless, of course, you disable the plugin in which case, you’ll have problems.

If you do not host with us currently and are experiencing issues you would like help with, feel free to contact us!

If you are a current client with us, thank you for your patience.  Please reach out to us anytime you have a problem or question and we’ll be happy to help!