What’s New in WordPress 6.0

See all of the new features and changes in WordPress 6.0 that will become available on May 24, 2022.

BlogAid News subscribers will get special update instructions when I feel it is safe for most of us to upgrade to 6.0.

Video

Transcript

Let’s dive in.

Let’s jump over to the test site and I’ll show you what’s coming.

Gutenberg Block Improvements

FYI, the following blocks can be used anywhere on the site that can accept blocks, but are primarily for use in the editor section.

And you can find full tutorials in my Gutenberg Ninja course.

Better Text Selection Across Blocks

Until now, it has been impossible to click and drag across multiple blocks to select or highlight content.

WP 6.0 now makes this possible.

FYI, there has always been another way to do this, though. You click once in the first block, then hold the Shift key and click in the last block you want to highlight. And that still works.

Multi Block Selection in List View

You can also now select multiple blocks while in the List View mode.

And it will draw a blue outline around the blocks in the content editor so you can be sure you have selected the correct ones.

To do this selection you will hold Shift and click on the blocks. 

Or you can hold Shift and use the Up and Down arrow keys to select more blocks in series.

Gallery Block Spacing Options

Images got a little love in WP 6.0.

In the Gallery block you can now add spacing between the images, which helps give them less of a collage look and more of a columns look.

New Featured Image Cover Block

Some themes can auto populate your Featured Image in special styling at the top of your posts. Now WP itself will allow for a bit of special styling with the ability to place your Featured Image into a Cover Block.

To do this, you must already have your Featured Image defined.

Then create a Cover Block.

To the left of the Add Media link is a new icon to choose your Featured Image.

What’s special about this is that a Cover Block has styling for opacity and text over the image.

I’m not a big fan of either of these features, as both will use a thumbnail of the image, and that could bork your optimization and render settings. So, be careful to ensure you are not giving up function just to automate style.

Columns Block Border and Padding

We’ve had the ability to add a background color to the Columns Block for a while. But now you’ll also be able to add a border and control the radius of the corners to make them more rounded, if you like.

The nice thing is, you can use the border by itself to give a column area a little more definition without being concerned about contrast issues between a background color and your text.

You will also be able to add padding to the entire column block.

And all of this is in addition to the padding and other styling choices you have for each of the individual columns.

Responsive Group and Row Blocks

How nested blocks layout on mobile may not look or act as you would like them to.

WP 6.0 has improved the Group and Row blocks to give you layout choices as well as stack choices.

These will mainly impact the behavior of content you have laid out to display side-by-side on desktop as to how it will appear in a single mobile column.

I strongly suggest that you test this setting using a tool like Responsinator to see how your theme reacts to it on different mobile devices and orientations.

Lock Reusable Blocks

If you have multiple authors on a site, any of them could change the contents of a Reusable Block. And that would change it everywhere on the site.

WP 6.0 has a new lock feature that prevents accidental editing or removal of the block.

I’m not clear on who has the authority to turn these features off, though. So, if that same user can easily unlock it, then this feature just keeps folks from making inadvertent mistakes.

Internal Links Shortcut

If you like to do a lot of internal linking to your other posts or pages, you’re going to love this new feature in WP 6.0.

Instead of having to type in the anchor text for the post or page title, and then highlighting it, and then sourcing the link, you can now type two bracket symbols and a pop up will appear with other posts. If the list is long, you can keep typing the title until it shows up and click and it will auto populate the rest of the text and the link to it for you.

Now you can see that if I put a space in it, the whole thing goes away. So, it’s not quite perfected yet. But it beats going the long way to do this.

Accessibility Compliance Improvements

One of the main complaints about Gutenberg since its inception in late 2018 was the lack of Accessibilities Compliance.

I’m glad to see that WP has started seriously working to improve it over the last 2 years of releases. 

A few of newly added improvements in 6.0 include:

• Better screen reader support for text in the black admin bar at the top when you are logged in
• Better tabbing between blocks in the editor.
• The post title will auto populate as the alt text for the featured image. You can replace that text, if you like. But we’ll see how well this works, as manually entered alt text does not always hold when you upload an image while in the post editor.
• Voice callout for blocks that have placeholders
• Screen reader support for successful save as draft
• A check for proper contrast for link color settings
• Button text labels – this one is huge and something most of us had to get an extra plugin to do.

Full Site Editing Improvements

FYI, you need a fully-block-ready compliant theme to make use of all of these features. These are referred to here as FSE, or Full Site Editing themes.

Theme Style Changes

The WordPress TwentyTwentyTwo theme now supports one-click theme style changes.

And WP is encouraging all theme developers to begin supporting this feature as well.

So, even if you have an FSE compliant theme, it may or may not support this, or any of the other new FSE features yet.

Theme Export

Once you make all of your style changes on an FSE compliant theme, you will now be able to export it to use on any other site.

In essence, WP is now supporting a type of child theme. And this will be a real bonus for theme designers who want to use a single base theme and then tweak it for their customer’s branding color scheme.

New Full Site Editing Blocks

FYI, these new blocks are intended to be used with FSE compliant themes.

New Read More Block

Now you can customize a Read More button just like you can with the regular Button block. But this one will appear anywhere your theme supports an automatic insertion of a Read More link, like in a Post Grid type block.

Comments and Sub Blocks

The Comments Block allows you to add a comments query loop to any post or page.

It also contains the following sub-blocks for the Comments section:

• Author name
• Avatar
• Comment content
• Edit link
• And a few others

Post Author Bio and Avatar Blocks

There is also a dedicated Author Bio Block that can be used on the posts page.

And there is also a dedicated Avatar block to display a profile photo of the author.

No Results Query Loop

If you have a query loop feature on your site, you can also include a No Results Block that will display a custom message when no results were found.

Developer Improvements

There are some notable API and code changes in WP 6.0 as well.

WebFont API

Local fonts can now be managed through either PHP or theme.json via the new Webfonts API.

Widgets API

Some themes have been experiencing issues with blocks appearing in widget areas even though the theme or a plugin has been used to keep the classic widgets. WP 6.0 has a new API to help stop those blocks from appearing.

Cache Operations Improved

The ability to collect multiple cache keys in one action was added in WP 5.5.

The new API in WP 6.0 improves that function.

Plus, runtime cache can now be properly flushed too.

The Cache Limit of 24 hours for persistent object caching has been removed, if the cache has not been invalidated.

All of these improvements came from work done in the WP Performance Team and will contribute to faster load times.