[00:00:00] **Dustin:** On today's episode, we are going to talk about and review WordPress 6. 5 right here on your Website Engineer podcast episode number 549 Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website. Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. And today we've got a new version of WordPress, and we're going to talk all about it. And we're going to see some of the cool new features that are coming up or are actually in this latest version.

But first I have four announcements and a plugin to share. The first announcement is all about a hackathon project. And this is over on the wordpress. com blog about registering custom post types Inside the WordPress admin. And I don't know if you've ever used custom post types. I use them all the time for all kinds of things, like whether they be specific speakers, or maybe I have some sort of special content that I want in a particular way.

I know that on your website, engineer. com, I have a custom post type area for podcasts. And then all my podcasts are separate from the blog posts. And there are YouTube videos that are webinars that are separate from all the other things. [00:01:00] But this is a project that they talked about. They had a hack a day project at the seventh annual cloud fest hackathon in Rust, Germany, and after 48 hours, an idea turned in reality.

Some developers were able to make a way that they could create a custom post types inside the WordPress dashboard in just two days. There's a whole article over on the wordpress. com blog that you can read all about it and see some videos of how this could work. And so I think that's a really neat feature and should be something that is easily creatable. inside of WordPress without having to use an extra plugin or go into the code and add a custom plugin to add the custom post type.

So if you're interested in learning more about that, I recommend going over and checking that out.

The next article is about the WordPress training teams, big changes, the learning pathways and website redesigned. They are working through how to provide education on working through and learning about WordPress. They're trying to figure out the problem of allowing WordPress that come to the learn WordPress site to find specific content that they need, whether they're [00:02:00] brand new to WordPress or have some experience and they want to take their experience to whatever the next logical level is.

So they're, Right now, the content is more organized like a blog. It shows the newest content first, roughly categorized by concepts to help users find what they need. A new pathway will more effectively categorized courses based on three different types of learners, users, developers and designers. And then the content will use each user type organized by skill and starting level with beginner moving through intermediate and expert.

I think that it makes a lot more sense to organize information in this way, just because like reverse chronological order of blog posts doesn't really make a lot of sense when you're trying to learn a process. Think about like, if you take a course on code Academy or tree house or any of those other code places, like it's going to give you a logical step and breakdown on how to learn and what to learn first.

Like you probably want to learn. All of the things that are in the menu or, you know, some of those things first before you're actually diving into adding featured images or using the site editor. So that [00:03:00] is an article there. If you're interested in learning more about that.

There's another blog post on wordpress. org that talks about a visit to where the cloud touches the ground. I know that we talk about, oh, it's up in the cloud. It's up in the cloud. And we talk about all that all the time. We kind of references, but this article goes through and talks about some of the information about where the wordpress. com servers are located and how they work and how data centers and stuff like that work and the power and all that kind of stuff. It's a really neat article, so I recommend if this is something that's interesting to you, head on over to your website, engineer. com slash 549 and then you can click a link to go directly to this article.

And then the last article on the wordpress. org blog. So we've got articles from both wordpress. org and wordpress. com this week, but this is an article about how WordPress is creating a faster web. So with a lot of extra work focusing on how fast the dashboard works and how fast the front end of a site WordPress site works, it's going to make the web just a faster place to be and I think we can all agree that faster is better [00:04:00] the less we have to wait for things to load the better for everyone.

So you can read that article as well. All right, moving on into the is there a plugin for that section. This is one that came up in some of the troubleshooting that I do on my my day to day job here at Automattic, but basically we recommend different troubleshooting type plugins and this one is a new one I haven't heard of and it's called Check Conflicts and this plugin will allow you to enable or disable plugins and or activate a default theme for checking conflict between them for only your IP. So other users won't see any changes.

So this is made for developers or support engineers as well as regular WordPress users. Sometimes usually after uploading a plugin or theme or WordPress installation, strange things may happen and mess things up in this plugin will provide a way to check the problem so you can change active plugins for only your IP, change active themes for only your IP, add additional IPs to these settings, reset settings, and it does support multi site.

The other plugin that I recommend regularly is called Health Check. [00:05:00] And while this one works well, you can enable and deactivate all these kind of things, but it's meant only for the logged in users. I think how this one might be a little bit easier to use is if you go and put your IP address in the dashboard, then it's going to work for all of your devices on your network.

So then if you need, if it was a mobile issue, you could just load the mobile website and check it on your phone without having to log into your phone and do those types of things. So this is something that may or may not work. If you're looking to troubleshoot, or you're looking to front, trying to figure out what kind of problem or why we're having this certain issue on a site, I recommend checking out the plugin called. Check Conflicts. All right, let's say hello to WordPress 6. 5 Regina, and this is named after the renowned jazz violinist, Regina Carter.

This latest version of WordPress puts more power into the details. It offers new and improved ways to fine tune and enhance your site building experience. It lets you take more control on the ways to make it your own. You'll even find ways to manage your site's typography, [00:06:00] more comprehensive revisions available in more places, and a collection of site editor updates paired with an impressive performance to gains to help you get things done more smoothly and more quickly.

Regina also marks the introduction of some breakthrough development tools that will start transforming how you use and extend blocks to craft engaging experiences, the interactivity API opens up a world of creative front end possibilities while the block bending API makes dynamic connections between the blocks and the data seamless.

These among other developer focused improvements and updates are ready to help you evolve and build your WordPress. That's the, that is the synopsis here on the wordpress. org page.

All right. So what is in 6. 5? One of the big features that has been delayed from multiple past releases is now the ability to add and manage fonts across your site. There is a new font library and you are now in control of your entire site's design, the typography without any code or any extra steps.

You can install and [00:07:00] remove and activate local or Google fonts on your site for any block theme .This also includes the ability for custom typography collections to give site creators and publishers more options when it comes to styling content.

So if you've ever added custom fonts before it is kind of a pain you have to upload the font to your either Ftp it onto your site or you can use google fonts and then you have to have that google connection. It's really hard It's really not, not friendly at all. And so this makes it so much easier to add those custom fonts and there's thousands of fonts on Google that you can just go ahead and grab and install.

And it's an amazing feature. You can also get more information from your revisions, including revisions for template and template parts.

This is a neat feature in the fact that it shows if you're looking at the template or block editor type stuff, you can see that. Oh, well, James changed a button, a pull quote in a site title and some color changes eight minutes ago, and these styles are applied to your site. Or you can see that three [00:08:00] hours ago, so and so logged in and they did this, this and this to those templates.

So you can see a kind of a breakdown, almost like a chat. GPT summary of like, Hey, here's the things that we changed. You can see that now in those dashboards in the revision area before in the past with the revisions, you have to kind of like line them up and see what's the differences between them.

But this is this interface is so much nicer and it looks so much better. Also uses the users gravatar so you can see exactly who was at a quick glance of who made those changes. You also have the ability to do some more with your images, play with background and shadow tools. You can control the size, repeat, and focal points for background images in a group block.

You can also set aspect ratios for cover blocks and easily add cover overlays that automatically source from your chosen image. And then you can add a box shadow support to move more block types and create more layouts with visual depth. And so that one is something that's nice. It kind of shows that grid and you can say, here's where I want the focal point to be.

And then that also helps when you have mobile devices, it kind of crops it [00:09:00] and make sure that focal point is always on point. I think this is going to be a huge feature when it comes to adding text on certain images, I know that this happens a lot on cover images. People will put text on it, but then when it crops it, it doesn't know where the focus is.

And so most of that text is always cropped out. And so that is something that, um, you can look at in 6.5.

There's also a new data views, and so this basically allows you to filter your different data in different ways. You can discover new things with data views, and basically every piece of content on your site comes with a library of information and data. Now you can find what you quickly need and organize it however you like. So data views for pages or templates or patterns or template parts can let you see data in a table or grid view with the option to toggle fields to make bulk changes.

Also, now the one of the key features in 6. 5 is smoother drag and drop so you can feel the difference when you move things around with helpful visual cues like displaced items in list view or frictionless dragging anywhere in your workspace from beginning to end.

So [00:10:00] take a note at that, especially if you are using that list view that's on the left hand side. After you add a bunch of blocks, you can pick them up and you can drag them and it just feels just more intuitive. It just I don't know. It feels fresh, I guess. They fixed a lot of things when it comes to adding links to posts or pages.

In WordPress 6. 4 you could highlight some text and then create a link and then it would automatically close that dialog box and then you'd have to click on it again and then you'd have to click on the link and then you could get the dialog box. If you wanted to open it in a separate link or you needed to edit the text or things like that.

Now it comes with a more intuitive link building experience. It's a much better UI and a shortcut for copying links immediately like right in there. This one is almost one that you just have to try. Just go and have WordPress at 6. 5 running, add a link to something, and then just see the difference in how much more intuitive it is.

I think there's parts of it that when you paste a certain link in for the first time, like it is, it's gonna keep that dialogue box open. But if you're using a link that you've already used before, like, I think there's some [00:11:00] smartness in that as well. Then when it comes to developers, there is something called the interactivity API.

And this offers a standardized method for building interactive front end experiences with Blocks. It's a simplifies the process and fewer dependencies on external tooling while maintaining optimal performance. You can do cool things with user experiences, fetching survey results instantly, or letting visitors interact with content in real time.

And I can't do justice in explaining what the interactivity API is, but I'll link to one of the WP Briefing podcast where Josepha has one of the lead developers on and talks through some of these changes and that'll give you a better sense of what this feature is and how this will work.

There's also a section in this developer section that adds appearance tools to classic themes, so you can opt in now for support for spacing, border, typography, and color options, even without using theme. json. So once the support for a classic theme is enabled, more tools will be automatically added as they become [00:12:00] available.

There's new improvements with the plugin experience of setting dependencies. And so now plugin authors can supply a new requires plugin header with a common separated value, like a CSV file of listed plugins, slugs, presenting users with links to install and activate the plugins first. I know that this is coming out with WooCommerce.

Like if you install WooCommerce and then. Then you add some extensions. It'll say like a plugin depends on WooCommerce. So you cannot delete WooCommerce because you have all these depending these dependent plugins on it..

The performance updates in this release, there was 110 of them resulting in an impressive increase in speed and efficiency across the post editor and site editor loading is over two times faster than in 6. 4 with an input speed, like so entering text is up to five times faster than previous releases. Translated sites will see a 25 percent improvement in load time, based on some of the performance translations that was added to this feature. And then let's see what else there were 65 different accessibility [00:13:00] improvements across the platform, making it more accessible than ever. It includes an important fix that unblocks access to the admin submenu for screen readers and others who navigate by the keyboard. This release also adds fixes to color contrast and admin focus states, positioning of elements and cursor focus, among many other things to help improve the WordPress experience for everyone.

6.5 is only available because of the countless efforts and passions of about 700 contributors from at least a 57 countries. And this release welcomed over 150 first time contributors. All of these people, 700 people work together to fix and deliver more than 2500 enhancements and fixes and ensures a stable release for all a testament for the power and the capabilities of WordPress in the open source community.

And so if your website hasn't quite updated yet, I know a lot of hosts, it's been a couple of weeks since it's come out and we're actually up to WordPress at 6. 5. 2. So there's been two maintenance and fixed releases. So those are out. I think we are at the [00:14:00] perfect time to update our sites and start using some of these new features and these new benefits of the tool. So to wrap us up the haiku that was at the end of this post says 6. 5 is here.

Play, interact, build better, stronger, and faster. And that's what I wanted to share with you today. Go out, update your sites to WordPress 6. 5. 2. And, we'll talk again soon. Bye bye. For more great WordPress information, head on over to YourWebsiteEngineer. com