Those same users might have noticed we made no blog post when 5.5.7 shipped. That too was an oversight but on the whole 5.5.7 was filled with mainly smaller fixes and minor changes and enhancements. One of the bigger changes however was the upgrade of relevant Simple:Press database tables to enable the use of Emojis and 4 byte language encodings – a process that WordPress began in their 4.2.2 release.
Which brings us to todays update to 5.5.8. What we stupidly missed in the change to 4 byte encoding was that it could only be applied to users whose MySQL version is 5.5.3 or newer. Try using an Emoji on an older DB table and the forum post simply vanishes like snow on water! So 5.5.8 fixes that for those users whose host has not updated their mySQL server for a long, long time.
It’s a very small update but we have also fixed up a problem with the caching of guest user details; improved the handing of avatars for guests and, we hope, finally got to the bottom of a php notice that kept cropping up in the error log but has been hard to track down. And, of course, corrected the version number!
And finally – please note that the Emoji table fixes delivered today also effect one or two Simple:Press plugins – notably Private Messaging. These will also be made available for update today and users should update both core and plugins together.