WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” was once launched lately, named for famed American jazz pianist and singer Shirley Horn. This liberate introduces a brand new batch of writing and design equipment that give customers extra tough customization features within the editor. We coated many of the adjustments as they had been launched within the Gutenberg plugin and added to core, however listed here are some of the highlights.
Lightbox
WordPress now has core strengthen for loading pictures in a lightbox. It’s a easy, but sublime “increase on click on” characteristic that permits guests to increase pictures to be full-screen with out leaving the web page. The lightbox can also be enabled on a per-image foundation or site-wide below Kinds » Blocks » Photographs.
Redesigned Command Palette
The Command Palette has gotten a design refresh in 6.4 to be able to accommodate a rising catalog of instructions to be had to lend a hand customers carry out duties extra successfully. Customers can get entry to the device within the Website Editor and the Put up Editor alike, with explicit contextual command choices for saving time throughout each modifying reports.
Record View Enhancements
The Record View continues to get enhancements to make it extra helpful for purchasing a condensed assessment of the content material at a look. WordPress 6.4 provides media previews for the Gallery and Symbol blocks within the Record View. It additionally lets in customers to assign customized names for Staff blocks, which might be visual within the Record View so they may be able to be simply arranged.
Block Hooks
Block Hooks are a brand new developer characteristic, at first presented in Gutenberg 16.4 for auto-inserting blocks. Builders can specify a location the place a block shall be inserted, akin to ahead of or after a template. Customers can then reposition the blocks after insertion the usage of the editor equipment.
Twenty Twenty-4
WordPress 6.4 ships with a brand spanking new default theme, Twenty Twenty-4. It was once designed to be a multi-purpose theme, appropriate for construction quite a lot of web sites, together with blogs, companies, and portfolios. The theme comes with greater than 35 templates and patterns. Take a look at a reside demo to look the entire full-page patterns, phase patterns, and magnificence diversifications to be had in Twenty Twenty-4. It contains 3 other fully-built website demos for blogger, photographer, and entrepreneur use circumstances.
Different notable enhancements in 6.4 come with the next:
- Writing improvements with new keyboard shortcuts, smoother checklist merging, and advanced toolbar enjoy for the Navigation, Record, and Quote blocks
- Prepare patterns with customized classes, new complex filtering for patterns within the inserter
- Expanded design equipment: background pictures in Staff blocks, talent to handle picture dimensions in step with placeholder side ratios, upload buttons to the Navigation block, and extra
- Proportion patterns throughout WordPress websites by way of uploading and exporting them as JSON records from the Website Editor’s patterns view
Take a look at the pretty 6.4 liberate web page to see the entire main options highlighted. Underneath the hood there also are greater than 100 performance-related updates and a variety of accessibility enhancements that create an extra constant enjoyment within the website and put up editors.
That is the final main liberate deliberate for 2023. It contains contributions from greater than 600 other folks throughout 56 international locations, with 170 first-time participants.
WordPress 6.4 was once led by way of an underrepresented gender liberate squad, which Unencumber Lead Josepha Haden Chomphosy arranged “to welcome and empower numerous voices within the WordPress open supply venture.” In combination, they shipped 1,150 improvements and fixes to be had now in 6.4.
