WordPress 5.8 – What’s New?

Here’s a little summary of just some of the new features and improvements you can expect to see.

The beginnings of full site editing & widgets as blocks

Full site editing is coming – not fully with this release, but the way is being paved. As a start, 5.8 gives us widgets as blocks. So now you get the flexibility you have in the block editor with typography, colour, spacing etc, for your widgets. Farewell WYSIWYG.

WebP support

At last, WebP support comes to WordPress, so you’ll finally be able to upload WebP format images to your site. If you’d like 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, which will inherit styling from your WordPress theme.

This editor can be turned off but for those choosing to use it, the template editor will allow you to make use of the site editing blocks you’ll already know, like site logo, site title, site tagline, post title, post content, featured image, excerpt, date, categories, page list, login/out, and so on.

Gutenberg version 10.7 bringing improvements to the editor

As expected with each release, improvements and fixes are made to the Gutenberg editor. You can find out what to expect, such as more block design tools, and a nested block toolbar here.

New filters for images and media blocks

You will 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 searching for and adding a block through the add block panel, you will now be offered the choice of some suggested patterns for your blocks.

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 all of the blocks on your page, and easily navigate through them.

Some other changes of note:

• No more support for IE11
• Support for New Emojis

Let us know what your most anticipated changes are, and don’t forget how important it is to keep your WordPress Core and plugins up-to-date.