Dustin: [00:00:00] On today's episode, we are going to talk about the latest version of WordPress. That's WordPress 6.7, released on November 12th, 2024, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, episode number 554.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast.

My name is Dustin Hartzler. And today we are going to get into something that came out two months ago, more than two months ago, and we're almost ready for the next version of WordPress. But I thought let's talk about it real quick and just get an idea of some of those features that. You may have discovered in like wondered where they came from,

Alright. so WordPress Rollins came out on November 12th, 2024. And it was the third and final release of 2024. And even though it was released in 2024, it came with the very first feature was a brand new default theme called. 2025. So 2025 is fully compatible with the site editor. It emphasizes [00:01:00] flexibility and adaptability.

It includes templates for personal blogs, photo blogs and complex blogs. 2025 features high quality fonts, supporting multiple different languages. And it also has a variety of color palettes and patterns. And this is what I'm using to build yourwebsiteengineer.com version 2. 0 whatever version that I'm on at this time, but I'm using this in. is a example of how we can easily build with the latest theme. And then as we roll into 2026, 2027, I should be able to roll those right into the next version of the site. So that is the first thing that I wanted to share about WordPress 6. 7.

The second thing is called a zoom out mode. And this is a new feature making it easier to create content and to edit. And I don't know if you've seen this or not, but it's a section that you can click on a button inside the WordPress dashboard if you're using the block editor and it allows you to work on the pattern level instead of individual blocks.

And it kind of think about it like a bird's eye view of a post or, a [00:02:00] page or a template structure. So basically you have the ability to click this button and it like zooms out. So instead of you're really, really close to your content, your content has kind of moved back farther across the page.

I don't know if that's the best way to describe it. It kind of just like zooms it out. And then you can see more of your page. So if you're designing this big, long landing page, you can see more of your content. And then there's some features that are built in that you can allow to shuffle or move the pattern inside of your, your blocks, you could do that a lot easier with this new mode.

And then it enhances the ability to visualize the overall site layout. That's probably been the best thing. The other way to do this is you have to open your website into a browser and then you have to like zoom out. And so there's a button inside of Chrome and Safari that you can just zoom out so you can see things kind of like zoomed out.

Of course, that's what it is. But this is a feature that's built right into WordPress now. The next new feature is about enhanced block customizations. So this allows you to have better border support for multiple blocks. So if you [00:03:00] put multiple blocks together, you can put borders around those.

You can put borders around different categories or galleries. They also added new background image support for cover, group, and column blocks. So if you wanted to put an image in the background of those certain areas, you can do that as well. You now have the ability to add shadow support for group blocks and color support is expanded to buttons, list items and latest comment blocks.

So some of these are features that you see in the customization area. So if you add a button, you can go to the color section or where the styles are for that button, and then you can change some things there. You can normally do this for most types of blocks, but there were some blocks where you just couldn't do it.

And so that's what some of these enhanced block customizations are all about that came in this latest version.

Most of these are probably just under the hood enhancements that if you have never tried to customize a specific type of block, you might not have even noticed. And so this is just kind of adding to that oh, this is how it should work. This is how it should be. And that's what these block customizations are.

There's also been improvements with typography controls. [00:04:00] So now there's a new font management tools in the styles interface. So you can create, edit, apply custom font sizes, presets across your site. And then there is fluid typography feature for responsive font scaling. And so you can go ahead and you can get some visuals of what your font's going to look like bigger, smaller, and those types of things.

Also some media enhancements in this version. And that means that, that now supports the HEIC image format, auto sizes for lazy loading images and there's also been some improvements on background image support at the individual and the global levels.

There are, of course, developer features that were built into this new template registration of APIs. You can now preview options API for extending the previews drop down menus. There's improvements to the block bindings API. There's enhanced data view APIs. There were some changes to, to work with the performance with WordPress 6. 7. Including faster pattern loading, optimized previews in the data views, improved a php 8. [00:05:00] 0 supports, some deprecation of some code, removing stuff that doesn't work anymore. There's also been some functionality and some features to add streamlined query block looping.

And so, like, if you've ever had to try to pull in information to a page, maybe it's like, I want the 10 blog posts or I want to do this, right? You knew I need to have an offset of two, so I don't want the latest two, but I want all the rest of them. All of this now could be done with the query loop block.

The other thing that I really like about WordPress 6. 7 is the ability to connect blocks with custom fields with a no hassle, no code sort of way.

And so in the past, if you wanted to create a custom field inside of WordPress, maybe you wanted to put a, you know, use social links or you do something and you wanted it very easy for somebody to come to the WordPress editor and define it. Fill out extra fields that would then dynamically display on a post or a page.

Like for example, we have a speaker's page on our functional medicine site that basically has a person's image, it also has a place for credentials and then it has four places to put in their [00:06:00] social profiles for like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. If they have those things.

What I would did then is like, so that anybody could register a brand new speaker and then it dynamically added those links in the credentials in the places where they need. Well now with this ability to connect blocks with custom fields, you can do the exact same thing. So if I wanted to have a button, but I want the button text to now be the credentials, I can basically add a button and then I can go over on the, right hand side inside the blocks and now connect it to a data attribute.

And then being able to do that once it's connected, I can basically on the drop down, say credentials. And then every time that button refreshes, whether you be on a single page or on a page with a bunch of the different speakers, then it's going to pull in that data specific for that person.

The only thing that doesn't quite work yet is it would just say like credentials in the box in the preview mode. So when you're in the block editor itself, you're working through, you know, setting up what that post or page looks like. It's still just going to say the text of whatever that data attribute is.

It's not going to [00:07:00] give you the actual text, but other than that, it works really, really well.

The team has also added more than 65 accessibility fixes and enhancements. They, there's been tons of improvements to user interface components and keyboard navigation in the editor.

I don't know if you've ever tried, go the next time you're in WordPress, do command K on site editor pages, or when you're editing a post or page and see what you can do there, there's some cool new features that are built in there. There's also more accessible headings on the WordPress login screens, and there's clear labeling throughout the interface.

And so they've done a lot of work and this was a huge team effort and it wasn't just a handful of people. It took a small army of people to do this, even in the most volatile time in the WordPress space, probably, but there was more than 750 contributors who made it into that release, and that's just not people writing code. There's people that get it. props for translating something to a different language.

Or they went through and they did some research and they gave them, this is how other companies do this, or this is how other platforms do this. There's lots and lots and lots of different ways that you can [00:08:00] make contributions. And we probably should revisit that sometimes here in 2025 just because it has changed.

And there's a lot that you can do, even with no code experience whatsoever to be able to go in and contribute and give back to the WordPress project.

Looking ahead to WordPress is 6. 8. That development process or that development cycle is already in process. And the alpha phase is open right now. But we'll get to beta one phase in March. So March 4th, 2025. From that point on, the contributors will focus on testing and fixing bugs discovered during the beta testing.

Then throughout the rest of March will be all of the different betas and the release candidate with a targeted release date of April 15th, 2025. So right around tax time in the United States is when the next version of WordPress will come out. And I'll be continuing to monitor this, see what kind of things are happening. You can see what kind of things are coming.

And if you'd like to get in on the extra early type of testing in the alpha stage, there is a plug in that you can install on a local site. Do not [00:09:00] do this on a live site, but you can go ahead and install it and have the ability to have the bleeding edge nightly. So anytime that code is pushed and it's uploaded to the servers, it will download onto this test site.

And so if you're interested in there, maybe you have a theme or your developer for a plug in or running a business or whatnot. You want to see some of these changes that are coming. You could always do that. The other option is to use Gutenberg. There's a Gutenberg plugin, and that normally has some of the latest and greatest features that are already ready for consumption or ready for folks to start using.

And so you can use the Gutenberg plugin for that. So that's what I want to share with you this week. Again, it was a little on the late side, to get out to 6. 7. We'll be ready for WordPress 6. 8 in April. And I've got a lot more things lined up in the pipeline for the Your Website Engineer podcast.

So until next week, we'll talk again soon. Bye bye. For more great WordPress information, head on over to yourwebsiteengineer. com