There are more than 500 enhancements and 400 bug fixes included in WordPress 6.0. WordPress 6.0 is the second main version of this year and was been released on May 24, 2022. The version was named after jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill. For users of the most popular CMS in the world, there are again some new functions and improvements, highlighting a number of significant improvements aimed at making your WordPress content creation and site-building experience more feature-rich and intuitive. You’ll also find tools for developers and anyone interested in learning more about WordPress.
In the following article, I will give you an overview of all the innovations and functions that come with WordPress 6.0.
Improvements in “Full Site Editing” (FSE)
With WordPress 5.9, WordPress already took a very big step to support full site editing. The goal of the second Gutenberg phase was only just achieved, which is why the development team is trying to integrate the missing functions with WordPress 6.0.
Full Site Editing’s vision is to provide a collection of features that allow developers, editors, or web designers to create and design any part of their website using blocks.
Improved Writing Skills with WordPress 6 features
Whether you’re writing a fresh new post or adding components to an existing page, there are always ways to improve your writing. Look into other options for streamlining your content creation process, such as:
- Select text from numerous blocks at once and modify it all.
- To rapidly access the link menu, use two open brackets
- When converting certain blocks from one type to another—for example, from a paragraph block to a Code block—keep the existing styles.
- Create customized buttons, and any new buttons you create will automatically preserve the style customizations.
- Updated settings and controls and a new outline style for the tag cloud make tag clouds and social symbols even more appealing.
Hassle-free change of theme styles with the new WordPress 6 roadmap
Within WordPress 6.0 the “Global Style Variations” are introduced. These allow you to easily select from different design specifications. This changes the colors and fonts of the page, but not the layout.
Changing styles
The ability to incorporate several style variations is now available in block themes. This enhances the new Style system by allowing shortcuts to change the look and feel of your site while staying inside a single theme. Both the accessible settings, such as font-weight, and the stylistic options, such as the default color palette, can be changed. With only a few clicks, you can change the look and feel of your website.
Export WordPress Block Theme
Thanks to the new FSE block theme editor, from WordPress 6.0 you will be able to create your own templates, customize styles and design beautiful layouts. These can then be easily exported.
Now if someone creates a WordPress theme for you, they can export it at the end of their work and you can simply import it with all these settings, styles, and layouts.
Templates for page builder in WordPress 6.0
WordPress 6.0 introduces Page Patterns, a way for users to choose from a variety of templates to help design websites. For example, users can select page templates for a contact page, an about us page, an article page, and so on.
The Page Patterns option works for both the non-Gutenberg themes and the Gutenberg block themes.
Additional Template Options
Author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy are five new template choices in WordPress 6.0. Content developers will benefit from the new templates because they will have more options. Customize each with the tools you already have or the new features in this release.
- In the cover block, featured photos can be used: New image scaling options make it easy to achieve the desired results.
- The rapid inserter displays patterns and template sections when editing a template, at the root, or between blocks, to help you work faster and find new layout alternatives.
- The query block allows for multiple author filtering, custom taxonomies, and customizing what is displayed when there are no results.
Patterns That Work Together
Patterns will now appear in even more places where you need them, such as the fast inserter or when constructing a new header or footer. If you’re a block theme author, you may even utilize theme.json to register patterns from the Pattern Directory, allowing you to prioritize specific patterns that your theme’s users find most useful.
Enhanced List View
You may now pick numerous blocks from the list view, change them in bulk, and drag and drop them inside the list using new keyboard shortcuts. List View is simple to use and close; by default, it is collapsed, and when you select a block, it expands to the current selection.
Locking Controls Are Blocked
You can now secure your blocks. You can disable the ability to move, remove, or both blocks. This streamlines project handover, allowing your clients to express their creativity without fear of mistakenly destroying their website.
Additional Design Instruments
With each new edition, the design tools become more powerful and intuitive.
The following are some of the highlights of version 6.0:
- A new color panel design saves space while still displaying your options quickly.
- New border controls make it easier to customize your border to your liking.
- Color transparency levels allow for even more creative color combinations.
- In the Group block, you may control gaps, margins, typography, and more on a group of blocks all at once.
- To arrange groups of blocks with more layout flexibility, switch between the stack, row, and group variations.
- Use the Gallery block’s gap support functionality to create a variety of styles, from adding spacing between all photos to eliminating it entirely.
New blocks in block theme editor
Also with WordPress 6.0, there will again be a considerable number of new blocks that complement previously missing elements.
The comment block
When creating a blog post layout, the function to output comments was previously missing.
With the new “comment block” you have the possibility to design your comment function according to your taste from WordPress 6.0. Among other things, the comments that have been written or answered by the editorial team can be highlighted. Within the Comment Block, you can define and style sub-blocks such as the comment author’s name, their profile picture, the comment content, the edit link, and more.
The read more block
Within WordPress 5.9 it was previously only possible to adapt the text for «Read more», but not to design it.
There’s an introduction of a separate block that allows you to customize the text, background, and border. Of course, call-to-action buttons can also be installed in this way.
Query loop block with “No results” message
If you have added a query loop block to your page, for example, to display your latest blog article, the new update now also allows you to insert a suitable block for the error message. This tells you and your visitors that no results were found for your query and thus serves as an aid to finding a possible problem more quickly.
The author’s biography and avatar block
The author of a blog post is becoming increasingly important, not only from an SEO and Google E-A-T perspective. Readers also want to know who the author is and learn more about him. So far it has not been a problem to display the author’s name. With the new update, two new and in my opinion, important blocks are added.
With the “Biography Block,” you can display the description of the author, which you filled out in the profile settings. Thanks to the avatar block, you can also place the author’s picture. Of course, your Gravatar image is displayed here by default, unless you use a WordPress plugin, which allows you to activate your own profile images instead of Gravatar.
Changes to the Gutenberg editor within the new update
Most of us work with the Gutenberg editor every day to write and publish posts or pages. Even if the editor is already at a good level, the editor is improved with every WordPress update.
I have summarized the most important changes for you.
Easier text selection from multiple blocks
In the future, texts can be made across several blocks, whereby the complete blocks are no longer marked, but really only the selected text. Here you can also make changes to the text that affect the entire selected text.
Select multiple blocks in the list view
Until now it was impossible to select several blocks at the same time and either move them or adjust their design. This WordPress update fixes this problem.
Lock reusable blocks
A big problem with the reusable blocks is that the changes a user makes to them are also saved.
To fix this, there are already plugins you can use to lock down the reusable block and prevent users from editing it.
Responsive Group and Row Blocks
The new update lets you choose how blocks behave on different screen sizes.
With group blocks, you now have the option of displaying the blocks in a row or in a stack. You can now also select multiple blocks and then choose between a line or stack layout.
Post image in title block
If you want to use a featured image for a post in the title block, this can now also be implemented with the new update. So you only have to define in the title block that you want to display a featured image, which will be output for every post or page with a defined featured image.
Frame for Column Block
Rather a small update, but certainly not insignificant for some. With WordPress 6.0 you can also define a frame for the column block.
Spacing for gallery images
Do you regularly use the WordPress internal gallery function? Then defining distances between images might just be the update you’ve been waiting for.
Quick shortcut to add internal links
This update should be exciting for everyone who loves shortcuts. With this new update, you can now quickly add links by typing two square brackets followed by the title of the post or page.
Accessibility improvements
With each new version of WordPress, user-friendliness and accessibility are further optimized.
A variety of improvements were introduced, which I have briefly summarized here:
- The post title will be used as ALT text for featured images if no other ALT text is present
- Better selection of blocks with placeholder elements using the tab key Search indicator in a block search
- Readable description for blocks with a placeholder setup
- The labeling of the admin bar is now also readable for screen readers on smaller screens
Changes in the WordPress core
This current update also brings many changes for developers to use in their own themes, plugins, and projects.
Code improvements for image, quote, list, and group blocks
One of the improvements is the elimination of the DIV tag that surrounds each image. This makes the code a little bit lighter and less code is always better.
Previously: <div class=“wp-block-image alignleft“><figure><img src=“https://www.cubetech.ch/new-details-of-wordpress-6-0-reveal-major-changes/448508/someimage.jpg“ alt=““ width=“100″ height=“100″/></figure></div>
New: <figure class=“wp-block-image alignleft“><img src=“https://www.cubetech.ch/new-details-of-wordpress-6-0-reveal-major-changes/448508/someimage.jpg“ alt=““ width=“100″ height=“100″/></figure>
This change only applies to themes that support the new theme.json file.
Another change is the removal of HTML elements called “divs” that were automatically added to all blocks that had alignment applied.
Reminder to define the category
Anyone who regularly publishes articles quickly forgets to define the category before publishing. With this new update comes a change that I personally really appreciate.
When publishing, a note appears within the usual panel as to whether the author has not forgotten to define a category. In this case, the unpopular standard category is not automatically selected.
More changes in the core
- Webfonts API gives theme authors a more efficient way to manage local fonts via PHP or theme.json. Unfortunately, Google fonts cannot currently be implemented with the API, as some people believe that this would give Google further market power.
- There is a new API that prevents blocks from being displayed on the widgets screen.
- Starting with this update, developers can customize the get_the_author_link filter.
- The improved query for sticky posts.
Performance optimizations
One point, which of course should not be missing in such a large WordPress update, is a look at the improved performance that WordPress 6.0 will bring with it.
Fewer unnecessary queries
WordPress core committer Jonny Harris has patched a 12-year-old issue into WordPress core that he says can have a massive impact on custom page performance. The change, which will be included in the upcoming version 6.0, prevents unnecessary queries when developers use the do_parse_request filter. Plugins like the Google Site Kit Plugin (over 1 million installs), The Events Calendar (800,000 installs), and AMP (500,000 installs) currently use this filter. This can result in unnecessary SQL queries being run against those queries. By adding a return value to the WP class’s parse_request method, these queries can now be skipped.
Improved performance for navigation menu items
There will be a small update with a big effect on the navigation. Previously, this could not be cached natively by WordPress, which generated unnecessary queries with every page view. WordPress 6.0 can thereby improve the TTFB (Time to First Byte) of a website.
Improvement of term query caching
The new WordPress update brings a range of innovations for the caching of terms. In our opinion, only large sites and blogs with many terms should benefit from this. Here probably only if caching plugins also use this new function.
Conclusion
At first glance, WordPress 6.0 is a big number just because of the number, but the update will not be as huge as you might currently imagine.
First and foremost, good and important improvements have been made to the Gutenberg Editor. Furthermore, we worked diligently on FSE (Full Site Editing), whereby WordPress 6.0 could really be the conclusion of the second Gutenberg phase.
For all performance fans, the small adjustments regarding the caching of the navigation and the terms should be a welcome update. We will certainly see a few benchmarks here in the future.
When should I update to the new version?
Updates are always a great thing and should not be forgotten. However, always create a backup of your site (database and wp-content folder) before an update. It is best to test your WordPress site for bugs in a staging environment beforehand.
If you are not sure whether everything is running smoothly, you are welcome to contact us and we will help you update your WordPress site.