On May 24, 2022, WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” was released, inspired by Grammy Award-winning jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill. Known for his influence on modern Latin jazz, Arturo O’Farrill has released over 15 albums spanning five decades.
With almost 1000 improvements and bug fixes, the second major version of 2022 is here and you can download it now.
Site owners and administrators should upgrade to take full advantage of the many stability, performance, and usability improvements. WordPress users can look forward to several new features that improve content writing and design.
What’s in there?
Improved typing experience
Whether you’re shooting a brand new post or adding elements to an existing page, there are tons of enhancements available for writing. Discover other ways to streamline your content creation process, including:
- Mark text in multiple blocks for easy copy and paste.
- Add two open parentheses `
[[` for quick access to a list of recent posts and pages to improve internal linking. - Keep existing styles if you want to convert some blocks from one style to another, e.g. B. from a paragraph block to a code block.
- Create custom buttons and all new buttons will automatically save style changes.
- Make tag clouds and social network icons more engaging with updated settings and controls, and a new tag cloud outline style.
style change
Block themes now have the ability to include multiple style variations. This takes the new styling system even further, allowing you to change the look and feel of your website within a single theme. In block themes that support this feature, you can use both available settings, such as B. change the font weight, as well as style options, such as the default color palette. Change the look and feel of your website with just a few clicks.
More templates
WordPress 6.0 includes five new block theme templates: Author, Date, Categories, Tags, and Taxonomy. These additional templates offer more flexibility. You can customize each template with the tools you already know or with the following new options in this release.
- Featured images can be used in the cover block.
- New featured image size controls make it easier to achieve the desired results.
- When editing a template, at the beginning or between blocks, “Quick Insert” shows samples and template parts so you can work faster and discover new layout possibilities.
- The query block supports filtering by multiple authors, support for custom taxonomies, and customizing the display if there are no results.
Built-in templates
Templates now appear in even more places where you need them, such as B. Quick Insert or when creating a new header or footer. If you’re a block theme author, you can even create templates from the templates directory using `theme.json` so you can prioritize specific templates that will be most useful to your theme’s users.
Additional design tools
With each new version, the design tools become more powerful and intuitive. Highlights of 6.0 include:
- The new design of the color panel saves space, but still shows your options at a glance.
- The new border control allows you to easily adjust the border to your liking.
- The color transparency level gives you even more creative color possibilities.
- With a group block, you can control spacing, margins, typography, and more for a collection of blocks at once.
- Switch between stack, row and group variants to position groups of blocks with more layout flexibility.
- Use the gallery block spacing support feature to create a variety of looks, from adding spaces between all images to removing spaces entirely.
Better list view
New keyboard shortcuts allow you to select multiple blocks in list view, modify them, and move them around in the list. The list view can be opened and closed easily; it is collapsed by default and automatically expands to the current selection when you select a block.
Lockout controls
Now you can block your blocks. You can choose to disable the ability to move a block, remove a block, or both. This simplifies project handover and allows your clients to be creative without worrying about accidentally destroying their site in the process.
Improved performance in WordPress 6.0
This release includes several updates aimed at improving WordPress performance. These improvements cover several performance areas, including improved page and post load times, reduced execution times for various query types, caching, navigation menus, and more. The executive team’s working group is the primary focus area of the development team. You can find more information about the work of this group on Making WordPress under the hashtag #performance.
Improving the accessibility of WordPress 6.0
Accessibility is an integral part of WordPress’ mission to foster an inclusive community and support all users around the world. In this regard, WordPress 6.0 comes with more than 50 updates aimed at improving the accessibility of the platform. You can read more about these updates and learn more about current accessibility initiatives here.
Learn more about WordPress 6.0
See WordPress 6.0 in action! Many new and important features are shown in the following overview video. {English}
Visit learning.wordpress.org/workshops for short tutorial videos and much more information about new WordPress features. Or join an interactive online learning session on a specific WordPress topic.
Developers can explore the WordPress 6.0 Field Guide. It has many in-depth developer notes to help you get started with WordPress.
See the WordPress 6.0 changelog for more information on improvements included and issues fixed, installation information, notes to developers and resources, release contributors, and a list of file changes in this release.
WordPress 6.0 Release Team
The team below is tireless in supporting the release, from concept to release date and beyond:
Thanks to 500+ supporters
WordPress 6.0 would not have been possible without the contributions of over 500 people in at least 58 countries. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver hundreds of improvements and bug fixes in a stable release is a testament to the strength and capabilities of the WordPress community.
On the day of release, WordPress 6.0 was at least 90 percent translated into 76 languages. Community translation teams continue to work after launch to ensure that more translations are produced. Thanks to everyone who helps make WordPress available in 205 languages.
Thanks to all the community volunteers who answer questions from WordPress users around the world on the support forums.
If you’re interested in WordPress, it’s easy to learn more and get involved. Discover the different teams involved in WordPress development and learn more about the product roadmap on the main development blog.
WordPress mission and you
WordPress is software designed for everyone with a focus on accessibility, performance, security and ease of use. The project believes that great software should work with minimal settings so you can focus on freely presenting your story, product or service. The WordPress base software is simple and predictable, making it easy to get started. It also offers powerful opportunities for growth and success.
WordPress believes in the democratization of publishing and the freedoms that open source brings. This idea is supported by a large community of people who collaborate and contribute to this project. The WordPress community is welcoming and inclusive. The passion of your contributors drives WordPress success, which in turn helps you achieve your goals.
Learn more about WordPress and how to join the WordPress community to help shape the future of the world’s most popular website platform.