WordPress 6.0 Arturo is here, and it comes with a big milestone. In the second update of 2022, WordPress 6.0 comes with significant improvements in several areas of the CMS, from usability to performance. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new, and which features are worth trying.
Full Site-Editing (FSE)
WordPress 6.0 brings more improvements to the full site editing feature with new site-wide blocks, editable templates, and more patterns. And more features are still on the way. In a nutshell, Full Site Editing (FSE) is intended to make the entire site customizable with the block editor. Previously, all these controls were handled exclusively by your WordPress theme. Now, these features are baked in (with a blocked-based theme enabled). While FSE isn’t yet perfected, this update offers substantial improvements and additions.
Here are some of the new enhancements to look for:
Style Switching
Now you can switch the entire theme style with a single click. This gives you the ability to customize your site’s colors, typography, layouts, and more. With Style switching, you’ll be able to change the look and feel of your site using various colors and font combinations taken from a single theme. It’s incredibly easy to apply a new style variation across your entire site.
The Syle Panel offers several options including:
Typography – manage the typography settings for different elements, including text and links
Colors – Manage palettes and the default color of different global elements on the website. Palettes are used to provide default color options for blocks and various design tools. Here you can edit the colors with their labels, including backgrounds, text, and links
Layouts – This simply means adding padding
More Templates
Being able to use new templates to customize to build your website content is a welcomed addition. The previous version offered templates to choose from, but the options were limited. This is a huge time save, to say the least. WordPress 6.0 has expanded its template library and introduced several new templates for specific functions. These enhanced templates include additional options such as:
- Author – Displays latest posts written by a single author
- Date – Displays posts from a specific date
- Categories – Displays latest posts in a single post category
- Tag – Displays latest posts with a single post tag
- Taxonomy – Displays the latest post from a single post taxonomy
Writing Improvements
While the changes with the writing capabilities weren’t major, they did make some notable improvements. WordPress 6.0 has refined the process of making edits, customizations, and selecting multiple blocks. Some improvements include:
- Select text across multiple blocks for easier copying and pasting.
- Type two open brackets `[[` to quickly access a list of recent posts and pages.
- Keep existing styles when you transform some blocks from one kind to another—from a Paragraph block to a Code block, for instance.
- Create customized buttons and any new buttons you make will retain the style customizations automatically.
- Make tag clouds and social icons even more appealing with updated settings and controls, and a new outline style for the tag cloud.
Block Editor Improvements
The block editor brings new functionality, fixes, and more enhancements to the block editor tool, including several new blocks.
Block Locking Controls
Moving forward, you will now be able to lock down blocks within the block editor. This new feature is designed to help make the management of your sites easier, especially if certain blocks don’t need to be edited. This now gives you the ability to unearth your creativity without worrying about accidentally breaking your site in the process. It also helps lock in your creativity if you don’t want someone else logging in and potentially moving around one of your blocks. Once locked, a padlock icon will display indicating the block is locked.
Enhanced Block Controls
WordPress 6.0 also introduces a helpful new option when you customize or add a new button. Now when you insert a new button block, it will automatically retain the styling from adjacent buttons. You can create customized buttons and any new buttons you make will also customize automatically. Prior to this, you would need to redo all the customization if you wanted to add several buttons with the same style.
Style Retention
Another great new feature in WordPress 6.0 is style retention. It’s now possible to retain a block’s style when transforming certain blocks from one type to another. For example, you can keep the existing style from a paragraph block when transforming it into a code block. These new block transformation options are incredibly useful if you’re writing content to build a page and need to make quick changes to your blocks.
List View Enhancements
List View just got another facelift. New keyboard shortcuts enable you to select multiple blocks from the list view, modify them in bulk, and drag and drop them within the list. In addition, the list view is now collapsed by default. When you want to select a specific item, you can expand each area within the list view. Previously, all your blocks were completely expanded, making navigation a little tricky. Anyone who wants to just highlight precisely what they need vs a full catalog will appreciate this enhancement.
Final Thoughts
WordPress 6.0 also added new design tools such as a color panel design, transparency levels, control gaps, new border control, and more. These design tools continue to add more creativity and control to sites, and we expect to see more enhancements to these features with each release.
We are experts in building customized websites in WordPress and staying current on all the latest updates. If you’re interested in creating or rebuilding your current website, please contact us to see how we can help.