Upgrading to v28

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

To upgrade to Altis v28, edit your composer.json and change the version constraint for altis/altis and any local environment modules to ^28.0.0.

{
    "require": {
        "altis/altis": "^28.0.0"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "altis/local-server": "^28.0.0"
    },
    "config": {
        "platform": {
            "php": "8.4"
        }
    }
}

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 7.1

Altis adds support for WordPress 7.1, which brings significant improvements to the editor, admin experience, and accessibility:

  • Responsive block styles: Global Styles gains responsive style variations with configurable viewports, so you can control how a block looks at different screen sizes from Global Styles or in individual block settings, without custom CSS.
  • Admin bar, now in every editor: The WordPress admin bar now stays with you as you move across editor screens, so you always know where you are and have easy access to familiar tools.
  • Improved client-side media handling: Supported image operations, such as compression and resizing, can now happen in the browser before a file is uploaded, producing smaller files without hitting PHP memory limits or upload timeouts.
  • A growing Abilities API: Building on the AI foundations introduced in WordPress 7.0, wp_get_abilities() gains filtering, abilities gain execution lifecycle hooks and a unified flag for public exposure, and their schemas can now be prepared for use by clients.
  • Accessibility improvements: Admin screens gain clearer table structures and hierarchical relationships, and core interfaces get a standard accessible tooltip mechanism.

For more details check the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide

Headline Features

  • Traffic Management The Traffic Management feature gives administrators self-service control over the automated traffic — bots, crawlers, scrapers, and scripted clients — that reaches your environment. Rather than maintaining lists of individual user agents, you define rules based on traffic categories (such as AI crawlers or SEO tools) and signals (such as requests originating from known data centers). For each type of traffic, you can choose whether to allow it, block it, or require it to prove that it’s human.

  • Advanced Traffic Management (add-on) Every Altis customer gets bot categories and signals with the Allow, Block, and CAPTCHA actions. The Advanced Traffic Management add-on adds:

    • Targeted Protections — machine-learning and fingerprint-based rules that catch bots disguising themselves as ordinary browsers.
    • The Challenge action — silent background browser checks, so you can stop bots without showing anyone a puzzle.
    • Richer analytics — the Identified bots and Bot organizations tables on the Traffic page, naming the specific bots hitting your site and the companies behind them.

    To enable the add-on, or for help deciding whether it’s right for your site, contact your account manager or Altis support.

Altis Dashboard Features

  • The IP access control UI has been reworked, making it clearer which list an address belongs to and easier to manage allow and block entries. You can now also export and download your IP lists as text files.
  • The Export dialog now offers search and completions for database table names and paths, so setting up a partial export is quicker and less error-prone.
  • The Traffic page has a new Top user agents card, showing which user agents account for the most requests, so you can spot unwanted clients and decide whether to block them.

Altis Local Server Improvements

  • MySQL now defaults to 8.4 and is the only supported version — MySQL 8.0 support has been removed. See Breaking changes below if your project pins the mysql version.
  • Docker images have been updated, including a newer nginx container. Run composer server restart after upgrading to pick them up.

Breaking changes

  • MySQL 8.0 support has been removed from Local Server. MySQL 8.4 is now the only supported version. If your project pins the Local Server mysql option, remove it from your composer.json, otherwise Local Server will fail to start.

Platform Changes

WordPress 7.1 enables infinite scrolling in the Media Library grid by default. Infinite scrolling is a poor experience for accessibility, keyboard and screen reader users lose a stable end of the list to navigate to, and on the large media libraries typical of Altis sites the grid grows without bound as content loads beneath you. Altis switches it back off, so the grid shows a “Load More” button instead. WordPress 7.1 also adds a per-user “Infinite Scrolling” checkbox under “Users > Profile”; the Altis override takes precedence over it, so Altis hides the checkbox rather than showing a control that does nothing. A user’s saved preference is left untouched.

If you would rather follow WordPress core’s behavior, remove the Altis override:

{
    "extra": {
        "altis": {
            "modules": {
                "media": {
                    "disable-media-library-infinite-scroll": false
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

This removes the Altis override rather than forcing infinite scrolling on — you get whatever WordPress does by default, including the per-user profile setting, which becomes visible again. See Media Library Infinite Scrolling for more detail.

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.