[00:00:00] **Dustin:** On today's episode, we are going to talk about the new. 6. 4 right here on your website. Engineer podcast, episode number 543.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I'm excited to be here with you today because of course we have a new version of WordPress and we're going to get to that in just a couple of minutes. I have a few announcements to share and then a plugin.

The first thing that I want to share with you today is about Elementor Pro. And they've had some pricing adjustments and they've reduced some features. And there's a whole article over on WP Tavern that you can read about it. And you can find out more, but basically you check your plan. If you're using Elementor Pro and see, it sounds like some people's plans were updated to different pricing sounds, sounds like some are not.

And they're keeping the standard pricing. And so that is what I want to share today about Elementor pro Elementor pro is kind of like a Gutenberg. It's there's a handful of them out there. There's Elementor Pro, there's Divi, there's Beaver Builder, there's a few of them that are out there that do similar things to the block [00:01:00] editor, but there is a ton of people.

It shows in this article that there's over 5 million active installations, and so there are a lot of people using Elementor. So I want to recommend you go and check out and make sure you understand what your pricing is for Elementor Pro.

The next thing in the list here is... Is all about WordPress in 2024.

There's an article on WP tavern talking about the three different releases with a major focus in collaboration. And what that means is basically being able to have multiple people work on same things at the same time and kind of share kind of like a Google doc esque thing where you can have multiple people in the same document at the same time.

So this is a technically phase number three of the four phases that WordPress has been working through over the last handful of years. And it sounds like the 6. 5 release and the 6. 7 release will feature some of these collaboration features. And then 6. 6 is held specifically for maintenance in general, polish of the software and some things that they just didn't quite get to in 2023.

And that's what's coming in the space of WordPress over the next year And then [00:02:00] lastly there was some updates this past week on the theme handbook and it includes a brand new chapter on block templating and the chapter covers how the WordPress block template system works, how to build custom templates and parts, include them in a theme.

And this documentation is something that hasn't been there. And Justin Tadlock who used to run WP tavern, he commented this past week or posted on Twitter that it was kind of a hodge podge. It's mainly a lot of the handbook was all about the old school way of classic themes. And much of the content that was in there was kind of like half and half, some classic and some block, and they've added a whole nother section that's not this piecemeal patchwork thing together, but it's also it just shows how you can add block stuff to your theme.

And so that is something if you're a theme author or theme developer, I recommend checking out these new additions. All right. In the, is there a plugin for that section today? This is a plugin and it's a little different than I'm recommending one here that's only on GitHub right now, but this one is called enable button icons.

And this is a plugin made by [00:03:00] Nick Diego and it's a simple plugin. You can go over to the link in the show notes. It'll take you to GitHub and you can download this and it will basically allow you to add icons to your buttons within the block editor without any extra stuff.

Well, you need this plugin, but you don't need any additional plugins. So basically how it works is you will create a button and then you can over on the right hand side in the block options will be an option that you can add an icon is whether that be like a checkmark or a right arrow or some things that you probably have seen on buttons before to try to get people to take action.

You can now see this and do this with the enable button icon. So there's a link in the show notes. And you can find out more and you can see a little bit about how this works right from the show notes.

All right, let's go ahead and talk about WordPress 6. 4, codename Shirley. This release is named after the iconic jazz artist Shirley Horn, her distinctive voice and extraordinary connection to the piano established her as one of the leading jazz musicians of her generation.

And a quote from Josepha Haden Chomphosy , who is the executive director [00:04:00] of WordPress says many of the features and enhancements in WordPress 6. 4 fall in the small but mighty category, along with the adaptable beauty of 2024 theme these updates help content creators, site developers alike save time and effort while delivering the high value, low hassle WordPress experience the world has grown to expect.

So let's go ahead and dive into what exactly is in WordPress 6. 4. The first thing is that we want to note today is that it now has a brand new theme. 2024 is a new multifaceted default theme that has been thoughtfully created and crafted with three distinct use cases. From writers to artists to entrepreneurs, and you could save a ton of time and effort setting up a 2024 theme with the extensive collection of over 35 templates and patterns.

We've talked about patterns and templates before, but basically you can have the ability to change and switch to a different template style. And basically maybe you'll have a darker version or a light version or blue version or red [00:05:00] version, and you can pick which version.

And sometimes the different versions will have different fonts. I'll have different layouts and have different things. So this will help you unlock the world of creative possibilities with just a few tweaks. 2024 is remarkable flexibility ensures that it's an ideal fit for almost every type of site. There'll be a link in the show notes to, for seeing a demo of 2024.

Also, there's been some new enhancements to ensure content creation is a smooth one from find new keyboard shortcuts in list view, smarter list merging and enhanced control over quick link settings. A cohesive toolbar experience for the navigation list in quotes lets you work efficiently with the tooling that you need.

The next thing here is about the command palette and the command palette just got better. And it was first introduced in the last release WordPress at 6. 3. It's a powerful tool to quickly find what you need, perform tasks efficiently and speed up your building workflow. So there's been some refresh designed and some new commands that you can now use.

Now, as a [00:06:00] reminder, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, but some of the things that you could do in WordPress 6. 3 were you could edit a templates, you could reset a template, you could reset a template part, you could toggle setting sidebar. You could toggle block inspector, toggle spotlight mode. You could toggle full screen mode.

You can customize CSS, view templates, template parts, open menus, all that kind of stuff. But since 6. 3 and now in 6. 4, you can open your list view. You can edit the code editor. You can hide breadcrumbs. You can show breadcrumbs. You can enable or disable pre published checklist, and you can preview in a new tab.

You can do all of that now with the command palette, and you can also when you select a block with the command palette, you can group or ungroup. You can duplicate, remove, and you can add before or you can add after. So those are some of the new things in the command palette in 6.4.

Another thing that you can do is you can categorize and filter your pattern. So patterns are an excellent way to leverage your potential blocks and all of the settings that you have set up inside your site. WordPress 6. [00:07:00] 4 now allows you to organize them with. Custom categories. So you can call these about.

These are all my ones for about. So these air like my this or that you can. You can name them and pull them into buckets so you can find them more quickly and more easily. There's also some advanced filtering in the pattern section so you can find your patterns much more quickly.

In 6. 4, they've added some new design tools. So now you can build beautiful and functional layouts with an expanded set of tools. You can play with background images in group blocks for a unique design and maintain some image dimension consistency with placeholders with aspect ratios.

You want to add buttons to your navigation block. You can do that now without a line of code, which is really nice. You also can make your images stand out. So now one of the big features, this is probably one of the biggest features that you'll have heard of on WordPress 6. 4 is now you can enable light box functionality to let your visitors enjoy full screen interactive images.

You can apply it globally or does specific images itself to customize the viewing experience. And the light box, remember is [00:08:00] like a modal that pops up and then your image takes up the full screen without opening another tab and without taking them away from their page.

The next thing that is another very popular feature of wordpress 6. 4 is the ability to rename group blocks so you can set custom names for group blocks to organize and distinguish areas of your content easily.

These names will be visible in the list view. So before you could put 2345 blocks into a group and then if you wanted to move that group from top to bottom. You could do that, but it was always just called group. Now you can use the three dots on the right. You can click on that and you can change that so you can call it hero area or featured product or whatever testimonial or call to action.

You can name those things. So as you're looking in the list view, you can easily move things and rearrange your page much easier.

This next feature in addition to WordPress 6. 4 is just, it's subtle, but I think it's really, really helpful. And it's going to make things just a little bit easier. Kind of like before when we just talked about you can rename groups. Now you can preview images in list view. And list view is the one if you go up to your [00:09:00] top menu bar and there's usually where the blue plus is or the blue box with the white plus.

Up there is something that kind of looks like a staircase. It's three horizontal lines, but they're not all in line. If you click this, it pulls out a panel to the left and it will show you a list view and this is going to show you all of your blocks, top to bottom across your page and what this feature is the preview images, and now you'll see a little image on the right hand side if you add an image block.

So if you add an image block of a dog, you're going to see the little image of a dog. If you have a gallery, it's going to show you the 345 images in that gallery so you can see exactly what that is.

It's again. It's one of those things that helps you know. Okay, that is the image that is the dog. This is the gallery of my cats. I can rearrange those, and I know what those are by looking in the list views.

One of the things about patterns is they're not consistent across websites. Maybe because sometimes they're different patterns come with different themes and then sometimes plugins will add patterns. Well, now we have the ability to share patterns across sites. [00:10:00] So if you want to use your custom pattern on another site, maybe you design something you're like, Oh, I really like this.

I want to move it over here. You can export and import them as json files from the new site editors view. So when you go up to the top and you click patterns, you can import pattern from a json. So you can do that and you can it's just makes it handy again to move things from site to site.

They introduced something new called block hooks, and this will enable developers to automatically insert dynamic blocks at specific content locations, enriching the extensibility of block themes throughout plugins. While considered a developer tool, this feature is geared to respect your preferences and give you complete control on add, dismiss, customize, auto inserted blocks as you need.

The example here in the release notes is about adding a cart button. So if you are adding a menu and you add WooCommerce, you can automatically add a cart button to your menu. And that would be something like a block hook that developers can add.

When we talk about performance wins, this release included more than 100 performance related updates for faster, more efficient [00:11:00] experiences.

Some notable focus were template, a loading preferences, usage of script loading strategies to defer in a sync core and blocking themes and make sure that those only load when necessary and optimizing some auto load options.

And, as always, every release is committed to making WordPress more accessible to everyone. WordPress 6. 4 brings several list view improvements and label support for the navigation block, among other highlights. The admin user interface now includes enhancements to button placement, add new menu item context, and site health spoken messages. So there's a whole section in the release notes about some of the accessibility updates as well.

Other things of interest for this release, PHP 8. 1 or 8. 2 are recommended for this use. You can find out more information in the show notes about the PHP support and also WordPress 6. 4 disable attachment pages for new installations.

I talked about this on the last episode, but basically if you have a brand new version of WordPress, when you add a image to the media library, it will not create an [00:12:00] attachment page. It will just, there'll be no attachment page and then you can put the image where you want without having these extra floating around attachment pages.

All of this stuff was added based on more than 600 contributors and at least 56 countries, and there were more than 170 first time contributors.

And you might have seen if your WordPress site auto updated that it's no longer on 6. 4. It's on 6. 4. 1. It was a maintenance release. There was four bugs that were fixed within just a couple days. The main one was the WordPress 6. 4 wp_remote_get. This was a error that was happening when plugins were trying to update from the WordPress repository, they would timeout. And so that was the big one that was fixed, but there was four total things that were fixed in WordPress 6. 4 that was released just two days after WordPress 6. 4 surely came out.

I think it's a really cool picture of how the community works. Like we do all this testing and we test a bunch of things, but there wasn't probably a lot of people that are like, Oh, let me test this by updating plugins and seeing if that broke.

And that's where we started to find the [00:13:00] issues. And then a small team of people got together. They figured out what was happening and how it was broken. And they got a release out within two days, or at least the post was two days later. It might've came out the next day. And so that is what I wanted to share today about how the WordPress community, like you may say, like, Oh, it's run by all these volunteers, but these volunteers jumped in to make sure that hundreds of millions of websites were not in a broken state after something happened in their core release. So that's what I want to share with you this week. Make sure that you're updated WordPress of 6. 4. 1 is the latest version, and we'll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye bye.

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