What’s new in WordPress 6.4?
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Speaker 2:The wpminute.com/support. It's WordPress six point four release day, and I'm really excited for this new version of WordPress. I think it's one of the most important releases for WordPress, especially through its new default theme 2024. I also think this is a first milestone release of an Apple way of releases, meaning just like iPhones and MacBooks, updates are iterative and not groundbreaking at every release. I see WordPress settling into a similar feature update cycle similar to Cupertino.
Speaker 2:So when I say it's important, I mean will this next year of development building off of 6.4 continue to bring WordPress into the future? Let me know what you think in the comments. Block editor updates in WordPress 6.4. WordPress 6.4 brings six Gutenberg releases into the whole of this core update. As the team continued to streamline the effect effectiveness of blocks and patterns, the pattern section in the site editor saw some minor updates.
Speaker 2:You can now see a patterns sync status in the details section. Custom patterns are now known as my patterns and given a more prominent position at the top of the pattern sidebar and the inserter. Footnotes editing feature received a number of bug fixes to make them more reliable. Thank thankfully, we all need those footnotes. And vertical text orientation is now available to a to themes via block typography settings panel.
Speaker 2:This allows text to be written vertically. This new feature is a first step towards full support of vertically written languages as well as for decorative purposes in website design. Everything that came from 16.3, it's all about patterns from Gutenberg 16.3. This includes a focus mode for editing patterns similar to viewing your editor screen in various viewport sizes. A sticky header bar on the patterns page keeps your search box in constant focus.
Speaker 2:And lastly, managing patterns is a bit easier through new renaming, duplicating and deleting of functions. Gutenberg 16.4 brought in auto inserting block features which helps in the front end and the site editor via the REST API. This isn't something average users will interact with but allows the theme and plugin devs to create more dynamic templates or patterns. Note, this becomes block hooks in Gutenberg 16.6. A new horizontal progress bar component loads across various areas of the site editor.
Speaker 2:You might see this. I expect to see this in more areas of the admin as that evolves. New commands in the command palette are now available. Show hide block breadcrumbs, enable disable pre published checklist, very useful, and preview in a new tab. Gutenberg 16.5 delivered us some minor updates of the command palette.
Speaker 2:Most notable are the block related commands. For example, a user can select the block, open up the command palette, and then duplicate that block by giving the command palette the command duplicate. Gutenberg 16.6 auto insert blocks becomes block hooks in this version. Toolbars in the editor or at least child blocks that are now captured or attached to the parent block in an effort to declutter the editing experience. Gutenberg sixteen seven.
Speaker 2:Sadly, no font management made it into WordPress 6.4, but it is still available in the Gutenberg plugin if you run it as a standalone plugin on your WordPress instance. However, more pattern goodness did make it into WordPress 6.4 including the import export of patterns from one WordPress install to another. Pattern filters have been restructured into areas like all versus sync versus standard. And users can now name group blocks in the editor for a more organized feeling. Speaking of group blocks, you can now assign a background image to that group block.
Speaker 2:A handful of user interface updates, editor changes, and 100 performance updates were made to WordPress 6.4. Nothing of a major splash, but more of that iterative update I mentioned earlier. Two new admin notice functions were made available. WP get admin notice and WP admin notice are ready for developers. However, this isn't the saving grace for ads or nagging updates that it seems it is.
Speaker 2:One update users might notice is that new WordPress installations will now have attachment pages fully disabled for new sites or everything upgraded from 6.4 and on. This will benefit SEO by avoiding attachment pages created by default, which were indexed by search engines and could have led to bad results for users and site owners. There's also a range of other under the hood updates that most users won't notice when running WordPress 6.4. There's a big list. Here we go.
Speaker 2:Updates to the HTML API, improvements to object caching, new option functions, improvements to template loading, image loading optimization enhancements, script loading changes, style loading updates, and revisions are now supported for a post meta on an opt in basis. That might be quietly a huge benefit to a lot of installs. Arguably the most impactful update for WordPress 6.4 is the new default theme twenty twenty four. As I've followed the development of this theme, core contributors and other community members really see this theme as the most feature complete theme for site builders. My own opinion is that for default theme, it's still very opinionated for design.
Speaker 2:We'll dive deeper into this theme in future content, but I am overall happy with this direction. It does have a lot of patterns and flexibility available for many use cases. Why I think it's important for the direction of WordPress as a whole, here's a few bullet points. One, because it's the first default theme in the block based era to position itself this way. The site editor iteratively improving to a point where users might opt out of using classic themes and lots of patterns that should warm the average user up to becoming more comfortable with block based content for site editing.
Speaker 2:Time will tell how 2024 is adopted for the world's most popular content management system. I'd love to know how you plan on using twenty twenty four. Let me know in the comments or on social media. That's it for today's video. Thumbs up if you like the video.
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