WordPress 6.0 Arturo has been released on the 24 of May 2022, and this is the second major release in 2022. There are a lot of reasons to say the release is one of the most significant ones. This contains important updates to the full site customization experience, obtaining a newer way to build and manage websites.
In this article, we’ll show you what are you going to get in WordPress 6.0, and which features you should try after updating your websites.
[Note: WordPress 6.0 is a major release, and unless you are on a managed WordPress hosting service, you’ll have to manually initiate the update. Here’s how to safely update WordPress. Don’t forget to create a complete WordPress backup before updating.]
WordPress 6.0 brings notable improvements in several areas of the CMS, from usability to performance with much more customizability, including the following:
- Improved information architecture and template browsing experience
- Improved template creation
- New hooks
- Webfonts API
- A new Browse Mode for the site editor
- Alternative Global Styles
- An enhanced Navigation block
- New design tools
- Improved performance
- And much more…
Wait wait…. that’s not the end. WordPress 6.0 brings a number of exclusive changes with 251 Trac tickets, including 97 features, enhancements, and 131 bug fixes in total.
Table of Contents
Version 6 with Tons of Features & Functionalities
Yes, there’s a lot to say about the update. So without further ado, let’s get started & find out what’s new in WordPress 6.0 and how it works. Here is the short list of today’s topics:
- Special Features for Website Customization
- Enhanced Writing Experience
- Friendly Style Switching
- Flexibility in Template Choices
- Integrated Patterns
- Improved List View
- Block Locking Controls
- Additional Design Tools
1. Special features for website customization
Website customization is always a concerning issue in terms of users-centric points of view. This was the talk of the town once a major feature was introduced in the previous version. WordPress 6.0 continues to build upon the groundwork laid in 5.9 and it’s getting even better day by day. To take the advantage of full site editing, you should use a block-based theme such as WordPress’s Twenty-Twenty-Two.
2. Enhanced writing experience
WordPress 6.0 comes with several notable writing enhancements in the new wp version. Though they are not major changes by any means, you’ll certainly witness and appreciate the improvement in your overall writing experience.
If you ever tried selecting text from 2 separate blocks, you must get annoyed because it automatically set all the text from both blocks. However, WordPress 6.0 won’t be bothered with that issue anymore. Now, from WordPress 6.0 onwards, you’ll be able to select text across blocks and edit them to your wish. This is really a cool type of improvement in general.
3. Friendly style switching
There are people in the WordPress community who are excited after knowing this feature in the Site editor. You can use theme divergences derived from one single theme employing varied color and font mixtures. It sounds like you’re having several child themes but integrated into one single theme on your website. Most importantly you can apply a new style variation across your full website. Also, you’ll be able to change your website’s external look and feel with just a click.
4. Flexibility in template choices
WordPress 6.0 allows you to provide the ability to customize even more templates even inside the theme editor. In the previous version customizability in the template was limited. But WordPress 6.0 extends this customizability and introduced several new templates for particular functions. These include templates for displaying posts from:
- Author
- Category
- Date
- Tag
- Other custom taxonomies
5. Integrated Patterns
In the early days of WordPress 5.5, patterns have been one of the most powerful tools available for users. This will be a game-changer for at least two years. With WordPress 6.0, your WordPress theme can now include various patterns for must-have pages. This means that with WordPress 6.0 the ‘Add New Page’ screen will now bring up a popup with a list of patterns you can use to create pages. Since it is a brand new feature, any page patterns may not be implemented yet in your WordPress theme. That’s why you may not able to see the popup with patterns. However, the good thing is you can still use the patterns library to find and add patterns for the page you want to create.
6. Improved list view
WordPress 6.0 allows you to select multiple blocks in the list view. Moreover, you can use Shift+Click or Shift+Up+Down to select multiple adjacent blocks in the list view. You will see that blocks are grouped together and tumbled instead of showing everything you saw in the previous version. Actually, this will make navigating the list view much easier than ever.
7. Block locking controls
WordPress 6.0 lets you lock a block to restrict users from removing it or changing its position. One of the major pain points of using reusable blocks is that if a user makes any changes to these blocks, then those changes in the reusable blocks are saved. However, the block locking feature in WordPress 6.0 still needs to tweak the code to lock a block and it doesn’t solve that issue at the moment. Hopefully, this will be improved in the coming days when we can expect the issue would be fixed.
8. Additional design tools
WordPress 6.0 aims to improve user experience, introduce more customization options, and expand API support in the design tools. There are also many smaller improvements, like a better color palette interface and border control.
Here are some of the significant improvements for the design tools in WordPress 6.0:
- Layout transformation for multiple blocks. WordPress 6.0 will add new options in the block toolbar and the design tool panel to transform multiple blocks. Users can select several blocks and use this feature to transform them into container blocks like group, row, and stack blocks.
- Custom post date format. The design tool for post date block will provide the option to use a custom date format.
- Gallery block gap spacing. The gallery block will have a block gap spacing configuration in the block design tool. This will allow users to better customize the layout of image galleries.
- Web Fonts API. The Webfonts API integration was excluded from the WordPress 5.9 release and will be re-introduced in WordPress 6.0. Users and theme developers will be able to add web fonts options to the global styles interface.
- Typography support for container blocks. Group, row, and stack blocks will have typography options.
Conclusion
WordPress 6.0 will bring significant improvements to the full site editing experience. We can expect more flexibility in the site editor and more customization possibilities thanks to the enhancement of the blocks and design tools.
WordPress developers will release the first beta version of WordPress 6.0 on April 12, 2022. You can test it in a staging or testing environment to experience the features this major release will provide.