What is Coming in WordPress 6.0 | EP 718

What is Coming in WordPress 6.0

1. https://www.wpbeginner.com/news/whats-coming-in-wordpress-6-0-features-and-screenshots/ 00:28

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast i’m Tim Streifler. My co-host David Blackmon, uh is not with us for this episode but he will be back with us in a few episodes. He was tied up and i’m gonna get our schedules to match up for this recording session. So i am recording a few episodes solo. He’s in the process of moving and has a lot going on, and so um again he will be back with us in a few episodes. So today in episode 718 we are talking about what is coming in WordPress 6.0 and so the folks over at wpbeginner.com have a great article that i’m going to be uh basically using and referencing and so we’ll have the link to it in the show notes, but basically WordPress comes out with several new versions a year, and so this is actually going to be the second major release of 2022. And so at this pace you can expect at least one more major version. They don’t really go on any type of schedule with WordPress releases. They have things that they want to accomplish with each release, and they release it when it’s done. Um you know they don’t put themselves on tight deadlines they’ve kind of changed up the way they’re doing things for a while. They’re trying to like hit you know this many new releases a year. You know one per quarter something like that, and they’ve kind of stopped that uh workflow and just focused on on quality and accomplishing the right tasks for each each new version. So a couple of things the first thing is improvements to full site editing. In case you’ve been living under a rock, the new biggest thing that’s built into WordPress is the Gutenberg Block Editor. It’s basically a page builder that is native to WordPress, and so David and i are huge proponents of Divi, and we’ve been using Divi for years we’ve been developing add-ons for Divi separately our separate companies.  We’ve been developing those add-ons for Divi for years and so we’re very invested in Divi. Um so we’re not using Gutenberg and so i don’t have a lot to say about it and in terms of uh how it works and stuff. Obviously i’ve tested it but i don’t use it on a daily basis, but for people that do use it on a daily basis it’s pretty good. Yeah it’s working well, it’s come a long way since the beta versions uh that people hated when it was just a add-on plug-in and a lot of people were resistant but it’s a lot more widely accepted now. And so they’ve been coming up with the full site editing and basically extending what you can do with Gutenberg out of the box. And so uh a lot of the updates to WordPress 6.0 are centered around Ggutenberg so in WordPress 6.0 improvements to the full site editing. Also you’re going to be able to switch theme styles a lot more easily and so if you have a theme that has theme styles built in for Gutenberg you’re going to be able to do that right from the builder and change those that was something that was previously in the customizer and it’s been part of WordPress, and the customizer where theme authors could add in different theme styles that could be changed from the customizer. And so now it’s coming over into the theme editor as part of Gutenberg and now you can actually export your WordPress block theme, and so the the new theme editor it allows you to create your own templates, customize the styles, create beautiful layouts and then now you can actually export all that. And then be able to import it into a another WordPress website uh which is pretty cool. So again using  Divi has had those types of features being able to export layouts and and theme options and different parts of Divi um for a while now so this isn’t exactly new, it’s just new in Gutenberg. And that’s coming with WordPress 6.0. So the next thing is the new blocks in the theme editor. So WordPress 6.0 is going to introduce new blocks that you can use in your theme and template. So for example comments you can now add comments uh in a query loop block uh if you don’t know what the WordPress loop is it’s kind of complicated but basically the the new uh block is going to come with sub blocks like comment author name avatar comment content the edit link and then you can edit those parts individually. So rather than having one comment blocked with everything that you can’t customize individually, they’re now having sub blocks for that which is pretty cool and then there’s going to be a read more block. So there’s an expert block that was released in WordPress 5.0 that allows you to just enter the text you want to use for read more. Now WordPress 6.0 it’s going to come with a separate block as well you can choose different text background borders for the links to make it more prominent so basically you’re just it’s taking what was released in wordpress 5.0 and expanding on it um so the next thing is the no results in query loop so when adding a query loop block you can now insert the no results block inside it. However the block will only be available if your selected query doesn’t have any results, and so it’s again just giving you more control. WordPress 6.0 is is giving you more control and customization ability with adding these blocks and sub blocks and so forth so i’m just going to go through a few of these quickly here there’s a new post author biography. So now this block can be used along with the post author and avatar blocks too there’s a new avatar block as well. And so uh yeah so all those new blocks are coming with WordPress 6.0 in Gutenberg. Um and then there’s a lot of other changes to existing blocks as well so uh obviously Gutenberg is the main focus that the um WordPress core team has been working on for several years now and obviously WordPress 6.0 you’re seeing that trend continue. They’re not slowing down. Gutenberg is here to stay it’s been here to stay for a while now and so the future of WordPress is going to continue to be Gutenberg. But Gutenberg is just one option of what you can use as a page builder so there’s Divi there’s Elementor there’s Beaver Builder there’s Oxygen there’s Bricks Bbloxy there’s so many different page builders out there. And so if you don’t like Gutenberg you don’t have to use it but it is the default builder that is part of WordPress now. So there’s a lot of accessibility improvements and under the hood improvements web font api changes and stuff like that. So if you want to read through everything just click the link in our show notes that’ll take you to the WordPress 6.0 uh upcoming feature changes over at wpbeginner and you can you can go through and read everything yourself. So um that is it for today’s episode, tomorrow we are going to be talking about email hosting and should you host your email with your hosting company. So this is a really important topic so don’t want to miss this and so yeah until then take care bye.