What’s New in WordPress 6.7
See all of the new features for Gutenberg Blocks, design, images, and core code changes.
Gutenberg Blocks
There were 445 improvements added for Gutenberg Blocks in this release.
Here are some of the more important ones.
Background Image Support
You can add a background image to more blocks now including:
- Verse
- Quote
- Post content
- Group
The block will take on the height of the content, so the image cannot be seen in full until you add your content.
Plus, your theme’s fonts will be added, and if they are black, like they are here, they won’t show up on a dark image.
So you’ll need to do inline styling for them.
Border Support
With WP 6.7, more blocks have borders now, including:
- Buttons
- Lists
- Gallery
- Heading
- Media text
- Paragraph
- And more
Background Color and Padding Support
More blocks now have background color setting available too, including:
- Buttons
- List item
- Latest comments
Social Icons
The Social Icons block has a couple of changes.
Query Loop Block
The Query Loop Block has been improved. It has more layout options and filters
Click to Call
In the navigation menu, if you input a phone number, it will automatically add the tel: attribute to link it so that when a visitor clicks it, a call will be started.
Design Features
There are 3 new features that theme designers will really like.
Zoom Out Mode
In the top right you’ll find a new Zoom icon.
- Click it to make the editor page smaller.
- You can see more of the page at a time.
- Click it again to return to normal view size.
Font Library
For better privacy and speed, it’s best to host 3rd-party fonts locally now.
WP had already introduced a way to easily upload them, but keeping track of fonts by source was an issue.
In WP 6.7, if you’re working with a theme that has a Styles option, you can click it, then Typography, and see all of your fonts and their source.
Override Font Presets
Also on themes with a Styles option, you can easily override the theme’s font presets for size.
Images
There have been several updates to Images.
Auto Size for Lazy Load
An auto size will be added to images that lazy load if you’re not using a caching/optimization plugin that does that for you. This will help with page load speed.
Scale image with Lightbox Effect
Gallery images now have an effect to expand or enlarge them when clicked. I did not get this effect to work in my tests.
Things Not to Do with Images
There are 2 new image features in WP 6.7, but you should not use them if you care about disk space, speed, and accessibility compliance.
Drop multiple images
You can drag/drop multiple images into a single image block. A gallery block with default layout will automatically be created.
That is going to bypass putting alt text on the images, and doesn’t let you select the order when creating the Gallery.
HEIC Support
There is also new HEIC file format support for uploading images from phone.
That bypasses image optimization and alt text.
General Editor
There are 3 new features for the editor in general.
Publish Button Moved
In the top right, you’ll see that the Publish button has been moved to the far right.
New Preview Options
On some themes, you’ll also see a new option in the Preview tab for seeing it in your newsletter.
Turn Off New Pattern Pop Up.
On some themes, when you create a new page, the Pattern modal pops up.
You can go to Preference and turn it off. And then it will show a checkbox here to never show this pop up again.
Under the Hood
There were loads of core code changes in WP 6.7.
Bug Fixes
There are over 200 bug fixes in this release.
Prep for PHP 8.x
WP is compatible with PHP 8.1, with a few exceptions.
They made steps with this 6.7 release to bring it up to working order with PHP 8.4, but that PHP version is still not considered stable yet.
My clients are running 8.1 and we’ll be updating to 8.2 in early 2025.
Follow BlogAid
Those are the big changes in WP 6.7.
Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more WordPress tips and news.
