Plone 5.2.9 has been soft-released. Please give it a try and let me know if there are any critical issues. https://dist.plone.org/release/5.2-dev/versions.cfg
For those who haven't run across soft-releases before, this is the last step before the final release. Because things haven't been finalized yet, some packages may change between now and the release. It is not recommended to use soft-releases in production.
See also the release checklist on GitHub.
Python compatibility
As usual, this release supports Python 2.7, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8.
But note that both Python 2.7 and 3.6 have reached end of life. This means the wider Python community no longer supports it. For example, the default WSGI server used by Plone, which is waitress, has a security problem that is only solved on Python 3.7 and higher. If you use waitress on earlier Python versions, you are vulnerable.
Python 3.7 will reach end of life in June 2023. See Status of Python Versions for the canonical information. It will get harder to test and support Plone on unsupported Python versions.
Especially Python 2.7 should only be used as a temporary stepping stone before you migrate your Plone site to Python 3.
Highlights
There have not been that many changes since the previous release. Most effort is going into Plone 6 these days.
Some highlights of this release are:
-
waitress: Updated to version 2.1.2, which has a bugfix for the previous security fix. Version 2.1.1 could cause Plone to crash and restart. See also remark above on Python compatibility. -
plone.app.querystring:- Add negation-query operators
string.isNotandselection.none. - Make SearchableText work when using
andandoras search items.
- Add negation-query operators
-
zodbverify: Improve debugging output: show all objects that reference an oid. See Philip's blog post and discussion in pull request for more information.