WordPress 5.1 Beta released with new white screen of death protection

January 11, 2019 saw the release of the new beta version of WordPress 5.1 and here’s some of the features developers may want to test out:

• The Cron system can now be more easily replaced with a custom cron handler.
• When starting cron under PHP-FPM, the connection will return a response immediately, even for long running cron jobs.
• WP_DEBUG_LOG can be set to a custom log location.
• Introduced the wp_blogmeta table.
• Added LIKE support to meta_key comparisons in WP_Meta_Query.

And most interestingly, a new “white screen on death protection” feature has been added that will catch critical errors without crippling the dashboard, allowing users to login to admin to possibly fix the issue without having to FTP or access the backend.

Of course, as this is a beta release, we can only test and see how this feature works out, but if it makes it to the final release, it will certainly be a quality of life improvement for WordPress and server admins.

Learn more about WordPress 5.1 beta here.