Here’s a little summary of just some of the new features and improvements you can expect to see from WordPress 5.8.
The beginnings of full site editing & widgets as blocks
Full site editing is coming! Not fully just yet, but the way is being paved. As a start, WordPress 5.8 gives us widgets as blocks. So, now you’ll get the flexibility you have in the block editor (typography, colour, spacing, etc) for your widgets. Farewell WYSIWYG.
WebP support
At last, WebP support comes to WordPress. You’ll finally be able to upload WebP format images to your site. Want to know more about WebP and the hefty size savings it can make? Read our WebP post here.
Template editor
You will now have the option to create and reuse templates for your website. These will inherit styling from your WordPress theme.
The editor can be turned off. For those choosing to use it, the template editor will allow you to make use of the site editing blocks you already know, like:
- site logo
- post title
- site title
- post content
- site tagline
- featured image
- excerpt
- date
- categories
- page list
- login/out
Gutenberg version 10.7 bringing improvements to the editor
As you’d expect, with each release, improvements and fixes are made to the Gutenberg editor. You can find out what to expect, including more block design tools, and a nested block toolbar here.
New filters for images and media blocks
You’ll now be able to style and colourise your images, with some preset duotone effect filters, and by creating your own colour presets. If you’re creating a theme, you’ll be able to add these filters to your theme, to match your style and colour choices.
Suggested patterns for blocks
When you search for and add a block through the add block panel, you’ll now be offered the choice of some suggested patterns for you block.
Improvements to style loading for blocks
No more single block style minified css file, loading lots of unused css every time you load a page. Now only the block styles used on each page will load.
Even better, for blocks with very simple styling, the css will output onto page directly. This should make for faster loading pages.
List view
A new improved list view is being introduced, to give you visibility of, and easily navigate through all of the blocks on your page.
Some other changes of note:
- No more support for IE11
- Support for New Emojis
Let us know what your most anticipated changes are. Don’t forget how important it is to keep your WordPress Core and plugins up-to-date.
