originally posted on blog.accolades.dev
A few days ago I bumped into a problem on one of my client’s WordPress website. the problem was that some function like “submit” form was not responding.
The solution was at hand, but I found out something more serious was happening.
Hi, I am Luc, a web developer and programmer in his early 40’s that started his journey of coding in February 2019.
WordPress released the 5.5 version called “Eckstine” and it is outstanding regarding speed, search, and security as they state on their main website. If you’d like to read more about this update, you can do it here
The Problem
But with this update they brought a very big issue: jQuery seized to be 100% responsive. The problem is that the JavaScript library called jQuery Migrate doesn’t install itself on the majority of the website when update causing everything that is JavaScript related to work improperly. We can think of JavaScript as small engines behind the scene that turns user’s action in reality. These little engines work behind the scenes to make forms, search bars, and drop-down menus to function.
Having an older theme installed on your website that is outdated, compatibility will show and will cause issues.
So, the problem appears when a WordPress theme is old or a plugin is outdated. If the issue is with an older plugin, you can check the last time was updated, if it’s more than a year I recommend you to search a newer plugin with the same function, as that may cause the problem.
The Solution
As the main WordPress website states: “With the update to WordPress 5.5, a migration tool known as jQuery-migrate will no longer be enabled by default. This may lead to unexpected behaviors in some themes or plugins who run older code” the handy solution is to install a plugin called: “Enable jQuery Migrate Helper” which you can download it from here or if you feel like this too easy, you can go deeper and downgrade from version 5.5 to version 5.4.2 as a user said: “The best solution is to downgrade to 5.4.2 Using the WP Downgrade Plugin by Version 1.2.1 | By Reisetiger.”
Conclusion
As of all updates nowadays, this one brings solutions, speed, and reliability but as well while this happens, bugs are presents as well. The best, for now, is to use whatever you see fit, and with whatever CMS you feel comfortable.
I hope this brings a solution to your struggle and until next week I wish you a productive time ahead.
Top comments (6)
Many website developers are indeed affected by this problem and in the days to come, we will hear much more complaining.One of the reasons is that WP 5.5 deprecated support for jQuery Migrate, which may have caused at least 50,000 broken sites. An issue with the way themes handle paging is causing other sites to break after upgrading to version 5.5. Here is a nice workaround to this issue secure.wphackedhelp.com/blog/wordp...
What both worries and annoys me about Wordpress is that within the quote "With the update to WordPress 5.5, a migration tool known as jQuery-migrate will no longer be enabled by default. This may lead to unexpected behaviors in some themes or plugins who run older code", they are admitting that they have released a breaking change, but haven't bumped the version in a semantic manner.
They should have released this as version 6.0 so people knew they would need to take more time to look through the changes and test further. If I update something with only a bump in the minor version, I don't expect it to break anything.
Ok, so there are a lot of other things which annoy me about Wordpress, and this just adds to the list. But every time I read something about the platform, I wonder why people still use it. That, sadly, comes down to because people know it, and people don't like change.
Personally I use it because my clients has operated with it. It is indeed easy to use and everything else, but personally I prefer using pure html, css and vanilla js...until then, we use what we have at hand. Again, this is just a opinion from a fresh developer that has less than 2 years in development. 🙂
I usually take advantage of a plug-in called "Custom CSS and JS" or something similar, it permits html too.
I use it to override some styling using CSS and for patching or modifying things with js, i bet you can generate a nodeElement with a tinny custom script using this plugin to check if jQuery migrate is loaded and force the addition of it if not. I always try to install less plugins possible to avoid interoperability issues that they cause sometimes :D
Yes, Wordpress is a master to plugins. It has pro and cons... I like the way you approach the “install less plugins” thing... 🙂 Thank you for sharing.
Mil gracias por la aclaración en español. 🙂