WordPress 6.0 « Arturo » was released to the public on May 24, 2022. WordPress 6.0 completes Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project, bringing many improvements to the full site editing, blocks, and global styles features. This article will provide an overview of the next major release of WordPress.
Improved Writing Experience
There are numerous ways to improve your writing, whether you’re creating a new post or adding elements to an existing one. Investigate additional ways to streamline your content creation process, such as:
- Select text from multiple blocks to make copying and pasting easier.
- To quickly access a list of recent posts and pages, type two open brackets ‘[[‘.
- Maintain existing styles when converting some blocks from one type to another, such as from a Paragraph block to a Code block.
- Create customised buttons, and any new buttons you create will automatically retain the style customizations.
- Updated settings and controls, as well as a new outline style for the tag cloud, make tag clouds and social icons even more appealing.
Changing Styles
The option to include multiple style variations in block themes has been added. This enhances the new Style system by allowing shortcuts to change the look and feel of your site all within a single theme. You can change both the available settings, such as font-weight, and the style options, such as the default colour palette, in block themes that support this feature. With a few clicks, you can change the look and feel of your website.
More Template Options
WordPress 6.0 introduces five new block theme template options: author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy. These additional templates give content creators more options. Customize each with the tools you already have or with the new options in this release:
- Cover images can include featured images. The new image sizing controls make it easier to achieve the desired results.
- The quick inserter displays patterns and template parts while editing a template, at the root, or between blocks to help you work faster and discover new layout options.
- The query block supports filtering on multiple authors, custom taxonomies, and customising what is displayed when there are no results.
Patterns That Work Together
Patterns will now appear in more places, such as the quick inserter or when creating a new header or footer. If you’re a block theme author, you can even use ‘theme.json’ to register patterns from the Pattern Directory, allowing you to prioritise specific patterns that are most useful to your theme’s users.
Additional Design Resources
With each new release, design tools become more powerful and intuitive. Among the highlights of 6.0 are:
- A new colour panel design conserves space while still displaying your options at a glance.
- New border controls make it easier to set your border exactly how you want it.
- Color transparency levels allow for even more creative colour combinations.
- In the Group block, you can control gaps, margins, typography, and more on a collection of blocks all at once.
- To position groups of blocks with more layout flexibility, switch between stack, row, and group variations.
- Use the gap support functionality in the Gallery block to achieve a variety of looks, from adding spacing between all images to completely removing spacing.
Improved List View
You can now select multiple blocks from the list view, modify them in bulk, and drag and drop them within the list using new keyboard shortcuts. List View is simple to open and close; it is collapsed by default and expands to the current selection whenever you select a block.
Controls for Blocking Locking
You can now secure your blocks. You can disable the option to move or remove a block, or both. This simplifies project handover, allowing your clients to express themselves without fear of accidentally breaking their site.
WordPress 6.0 has improved performance
This release includes several updates aimed at improving WordPress’s performance. These improvements cover a wide range of performance areas, including faster page and post-load times, shorter query execution times, caching, navigation menus, and much more. The core development team’s performance team working group is a key focus area.
Making WordPress 6.0 More Accessible
WordPress’s mission of fostering an inclusive community and supporting users of all types around the world includes accessibility. With this in mind, WordPress 6.0 includes more than 50 updates aimed specifically at improving the platform’s accessibility.
To learn more on the same click here.
