Upgrading to v26

If you are migrating from WordPress to Altis, check out the migrating guide first.

To upgrade to Altis v26, edit your composer.json and change the version constraint for altis/altis and any local environment modules to ^26.0.0.

{
    "require": {
        "altis/altis": "^26.0.0"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "altis/local-server": "^26.0.0"
    },
    "config": {
        "platform": {
            "php": "8.3"
        }
    }
}

Once you have made these changes, run composer update and then run the wp altis migrate command:

# For cloud environments
wp altis migrate

# For local server
composer server cli -- altis migrate

WordPress 6.9

Altis adds support to WordPress 6.9, “Gene”, which brings collaboration-focused editor features plus meaningful frontend performance improvements:

  • Collaboration & workflow: New Notes enable block-level commenting for reviews, and the Command Palette is expanded for faster navigation/actions across the dashboard.
  • Editor & blocks: New Fit text to container typography option, improved drag-and-drop, and new blocks (including Accordion, Time to Read, and Math) to structure content.
  • Infrastructure/performance: Major script/style loading optimizations (e.g. fetchpriority, footer script modules, on-demand block styles for classic themes, skipping assets for hidden blocks, larger inline CSS limit, and minified/inlined block-theme styles), plus WP-Cron spawning at shutdown to reduce impact on request time.
  • Platform compatibility: Beta support for PHP 8.5 (review runtime/CI and extension compatibility matrices).

For more details check the WordPress 6.9 Field Guide

Headline Features

  • Afterburner has been upgraded to v1.0, which changes the architecture to move the object cache drop-in to user land PHP.
  • PHP 8.3 is the new default version and the minimum required version is PHP 8.2.

Altis Dashboard Features

  • Self-managed IP allow and block lists are now enabled by default for all customer environments.
  • We added checks to make sure you can’t accidentally block an IP from your allow list
  • Our AI bot detection list has been updated with new bot identifiers.

Altis Local Server Improvements

  • Traefik has been upgraded to v3, improving local server stability and ensuring compatibility with the latest versions of Docker and Docker Desktop. If you have added custom Docker containers to your local stack, you’ll need to update any Traefik labels/annotations in your add-ons to be compatible with Traefik v3. Refer to the Docker provider documentation for updated label formats and options of Traefik for Docker
  • MySQL has been upgraded to v8.0.44 which is a maintenance release focused on fixes and incremental performance improvements, including updates across InnoDB stability, query/optimizer correctness, and bundled OpenSSL refreshes on supported platforms.

Breaking changes

  • We upgraded our Enhanced Search module to use ElasticPress v5, which removed support for indexing users and user metadata. If you were using this feature, you can add the 10Up plugin ElasticPress Labs to re-enable user indexing.

Altis Core improvements

We have incorporated many updates to modules and libraries in Altis to bring in important bug fixes and improvements.

Documentation

Our developer focused documentation has been improved again. As usual, feedback from our customers and partners is always welcome. Please send us any feedback you have.