24.9-RC1

Changes compared to: 24.8

Enhancements:

• Improves the recognition of transition words for Farsi. #22158
• Introduces more robust HTML processing and highlighting for the consecutive sentences assessment. #21974
• Changes the applicability criteria of readability assessments so that they are shown even if there is little or no text. #22156

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where long sentences would be incorrectly highlighted in sentence length assessment in the default editor when they were part of a block that contained non-breaking spaces or closing tags (>). #21974
• Fixes a bug where the content image would not show on social previews when editing it in Elementor. #22106
• Fixes a bug where the advanced replacement variables would not be visible when editing social previews in Elementor. #22106
• Fixes a bug where Yoast modals would not be visible when using Astra plugins. #22127
• Fixes a potential fatal error on the dashboard page. #22160

Other:

• Updates the Google AI bot name in the crawl optimization settings from Google Bard to Google Gemini. #22148
• Adds a space before the closing slash in self-closing HTML tags to comply with recommended coding standards. Props to laxman1192. #21964

Non user facing:

• Renames a file not complying with PSR4. #22124
• Adds an update button and warning on the site kit integration card and widget for an unsupported site kit plugin version. #22144
• Reverts a not needed commit. #22123
• Improves the copy in the Search Ranking Compare widget. #22117
• Adds tests for the Search Ranking Compare widget. #22149
• Improve code documentation. #22143
• Updates dev dependencies. #22122
• Tidies up composer.json file. #22121
• Improve the format of code comments containing the @var tag. #22142
• Code consistency. #22119
• Adds data attributes to upsell buttons. #22113
• Fixes unconventional tag order in the code documentation. #22141
• Adds global error catching on a per widget basis. #22110
• Improve the code documentation. #22140
• Finalizes widget tooltips. #22103
• Removes Flesch reading ease from the assessments documentation. #22112
• Improves the code consistency. #22139
• Improves code consistency. #22138
• Code consistency. #22137
• Code consistency. #22136
• Remove dead code. #22135
• Adds unit tests for the site kit configuration object. #22085
• Fix incorrect types in the code documentation. #22130
• Removes redundant property names in @var tags. #22129
• Code consistency. #22128
• Adds and refactors tests to the widget factory class. #22150
• Fixes some responsiveness issue of the Dashboard. #22114
• Changes the max-width of the general and the settings pages to 2048 pixels. #22114
• Changes the arrows on the free installation success page to be the narrow variant. #22114
• Improves the responsiveness of the Search Ranking Compare widget in the dashboard. #22134
• Fixes a (behind a feature flag) bug where the Search Ranking Compare widget would be shown, despite the user not having the search console view data permissions. #22145
• Fixes a variety of broken @covers tags. #22126