The WordPress 6.0 “Arturo”, the second major release of 2022, landed today with more than 1,000 enhancements and bug fixes.
Justin Tadlock wrote in this twitter thread “WordPress 6.0 is one of the most exciting releases we’ve had in a while, especially for folks in the theming world. So many goodies to play with“.
Expanding Gutenberg into a full site editing experience in WordPress means that all of the problems the community had to address were complex and far-reaching. WordPress 6.0 is an example of the community’s commitment to tackling these tough challenges together. With thoughtful updates to the writing experience, building better block functionality, and adding a new intuitive style switcher, I’m really proud of the work that’s been done in this release to make a great site editing experience.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director (source: WordPress News)
The following official release video highlights the major enhancement and changes in WordPress 6.0
Some key highlights within the content creation and site-building feature sets include:
- Style Switching: switch up the look and feel of your site, all in one block theme. No need to change themes!
- More template options: use blocks to edit five more templates (author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy).
- Multi-select: Easily select text across multiple blocks. Edit to your liking.
- Retain Styles: Keep your custom styles in place, whether transforming between blocks or creating new buttons.
- More patterns in more places: the Quick Inserter surfaces patterns that might work well for the condition you’re in, baking in relevant patterns for template parts and pages you’re working on.
- List View improvements: New keyboard shortcuts (shift + click) let you select multiple blocks to modify in bulk (reposition, delete, etc.), see your content at a glance with a collapsed by default view, and more.
- Refined design tools: Explorea new color panel, transparency options, more group block variations to create new layout options (Stack, Row), the ability to set your featured image in a Cover block, control the exact size of your featured image, gap support for the Gallery block, and more.
- New blocks: Various Post Comments, Read More, No Results in Query Loop, Post Author Biography, Avatar blocks.
- Block Locking: Choose to disable the option to remove a block, move it, or both, right in the editor.
- Export block themes: Explore the improved block theme export tool, as WordPress heads closer to codeless visual block theme building.
Other major highlights of key enhancements is described in this release note. This WordPress 6.0 Field Guide details developer notes who spearheaded this release to help us learn with and extend WordPress.