WordPress 6.4 Release Update – DreamHost

The development cycle for WordPress 6.4 kicked off on June 5, 2023, with November 7, 2023, eyed as the discharge date for this latest version of the content management system.

WordPress users can expect an exciting slate of recent features and upgrades — announced on August 22, 2023 — to roll out with the brand new release, including a brand new default theme, Twenty Twenty-4.

Latest Release, Latest Theme

The driving concept of Twenty Twenty-4 is to create a universal theme that’s adaptable for a lot of forms of web sites, whatever the subject material. Unlike previous years, it doesn’t deal with a single motif. As a substitute, the developers have decided to explore three distinct use cases: one fitted to entrepreneurs and small businesses, one other for photographers and artists, and a 3rd one specifically designed for writers and bloggers. Essentially, it’s an amalgamation of templates and patterns that together form a comprehensive theme. These patterns feature various Home templates for diverse use cases corresponding to an About page, project summaries, RSVPs, and landing pages.

The design constituents of Twenty Twenty-4 are immediately distinguishable, drawing influence from current design movements. The theme employs the Cardo font, sourced from Google Fonts, for headlines, lending an air of sophistication, while it uses a sans-serif system font for paragraph text. The first color scheme of Twenty Twenty-4 is on the lighter side, however it also offers a darker style option that keeps the identical typography intact. Moreover, it comes with two additional sans-serif variations: one in a lightweight mode and one other in a dark mode.

As a block theme, Twenty Twenty-4 will likely be fully aligned with all site editor tools and can introduce several recent design instruments like the small print block and vertical text. A major goal of the theme is to effectively showcase complete page patterns and template variations. This feature eliminates the necessity for users to create whole pages from scratch, thereby simplifying their website-building experience.

Form and Functions

WordPress 6.4 narrows in on improving elements throughout the WordPress journey, from the intricacies of crafting a fresh post to overseeing patterns throughout your website. Within the midst of those enhancements, the core WordPress development team is trying to introduce fresh attributes corresponding to font customization and the Twenty Twenty-4 default theme while also addressing any missing points in existing features, like additional resources to expand in your designs.

Let’s dive into a few of the updates and functionalities you might expect within the pending release that’s still under development.

Font Library

The Font Library is designed to simplify the technique of applying and utilizing fonts throughout a web site. It also offers integration points for plugins. Whatever the currently lively theme, the Font Library will likely be accessible for you to select your site’s typefaces, akin to how the Media Library currently functions.

Font Face

The Font Face feature works alongside the Font Library, handling the server-side @font-face CSS style generation and output.

Revisions for Templates and Template Parts

Expanding on the core development team’s endeavor to include revisions for Styles, the completion of revisions for templates and template parts will enhance the editing journey. This may provide the potential to retract any modifications made to your design, irrespective of where you’ve made them.

Latest Blocks

Three recent blocks are currently into consideration for version 6.4.

• Table of Contents block
• Time to Read block
• Scrolling Marquee block

Image Lightbox

A WordPress native lightbox functionality, featuring a light-weight standardized JavaScript library, is being explored as an choice to toggle on for individual image blocks to start out.

Auto-Insert Blocks

In an ongoing quest to boost user-friendly interactions, the developers are delving into the potential of auto-embedding a block into relevant sections. For instance, in case you’ve just installed a plugin and are tweaking your navigation, a prompt pops up offering to effortlessly integrate a login/logout option.

Post Formats in Block Themes

Because the introduction of WordPress 3.1, post formats have been a key feature, and though block themes have worked with post formats, there are several improvements geared toward maximizing the usage of post format. These enhancements include:

• Managing posts without titles throughout the loop and templates.
• Initiating a pattern within the technique of making a recent post.
• Enhancing the distinct formatting of the post content block throughout the query loop.

Making the Best Even Higher

Simply because a platform like WordPress is already the most well-liked and most generally used CMS on the earth, that doesn’t mean that top-notch features that were implemented in previous releases can’t be made even simpler and useful. Let’s have a look at what all is into consideration for some spiffing-up in WordPress 6.4.

Writing Experience

Crafting content in WordPress, be it a fresh blog post or a brand recent page, must be a smooth and pleasurable process. The tools at your disposal should facilitate your artistic flow, not obstruct it. With its multitude of formats, design utilities, and alterations, blocks should instill in you a way of confidence to shape your vision. This update is devoted to making sure this experience continues to be the norm.

Interfaces and Tools

The tools available proceed to be improved to make making a site or writing a post more streamlined with the next focus areas:

• List View iterations with custom naming of Group blocks, media previews for gallery and image blocks, the flexibility to resize, keyboard shortcut for duplicating blocks, and more.
• Top Toolbar improvements, including resolving some keyboard navigation issues.
• Distraction-free improvements.
• Command Palette: Add recent block commands, refine the design, add support for registering commands without icons, improve command palette rendering on smaller viewports.

Site Editing

Specific refinements and enhancements that improve the broader WordPress user experience are a spotlight of release 6.4.

• Add “Show Template” toggle when editing pages.
• Add discussion settings/detail for pages.
• Display current modifications within the “Browse styles” panel.
• Remove coupling of template and template parts when switching themes.
• Site Editing: Hide page/post title.
• Site Editor → Page Inspector: Add the flexibility to change templates.
• Align page edit features in Site Editor and Post Editor.
• Add missing CSS classes to templates.
• Explore improvements to the Styles panel in Site Editor.

Design Tools

To enable more complex designs, various design tooling-related enhancements and extra functionality are being explored. These efforts range from block-specific changes like adding support for background images to the Group block, to larger efforts like extending theme.json to supply spacing size presets:

• Add box shadow component.
• Extend theme.json to supply spacing size presets.
• Add the flexibility for theme developers to configure their very own default min and max viewport widths for calculating fluid font sizes.
• Expanding and simplifying layout controls, including block support and the UI.
• Custom CSS Enhancements.
• Addressing design tooling consistency.
• Add block instance elements support for buttons and headings as a primary step within the broader idea of element sets.
• Advancing more aspect ratio support.
• Global Styles: Add support for elements to individual blocks.
• Site Logo: Add width unit support.
• Cover: Set custom color when applying the initial background image.
• Elements: Add support for text-based inputs.
• Categories: Add a listing style type choice to the categories block.
• Group Block: Add support for Background Images.
• Media + Text: Support featured image.

Global Styles

Global styles are each a system and an interface for managing styling across your site, from individual changes to a block to sweeping changes across a whole site. This current effort continues to evolve along the identical lines and across a broad range of things, from more technical updates in theme.json, to more UI-centered work across the Style Book tool. To proceed to broaden the chances with the built-in style system and to make it as easy as possible to make use of, the next work is planned:

• Style revisions: Add a side-by-side comparison, add pagination, add a reset to default revision.
• Style book: Iterate on presentation and design, add the flexibility to deal with individual block types, and integrate patterns.
• Theme.json: Enable references to work, add section-specific theme.json capabilities.
• Styles experience: exploring how best to represent the hierarchy of styles, show inherited styles, and manage style variations.

Patterns

After introducing the flexibility to create patterns directly within the editing experience, more advanced features and various quality-of-life improvements are planned for six.4, including the next:

• Add the flexibility to set categories.
• Update the inserter experience to make sure consistency between synced and unsynced.
• Improve compatibility for non-block themes.
• Iterate on patterns page’s empty category state.
• Synced Patterns: Not receiving alignment attributes within the editor.

Navigation Creation and Management

As with every release since WordPress 5.9, the Navigation block and navigation management refinements proceed to have a particular focus: to make it more robust and useful, especially on the subject of various responsive needs:

• Overlay referenced as a template part
• Add the flexibility to see where each menu is used.
• Add the flexibility to style the present menu item.
• Allow an choice to set a custom icon.
• Add the flexibility to set different links on mobile.
• Explore a bulk add mode.
• Continued iteration to enhance fallbacks.

Query Loop Block

To raised enable more complex queries and convey more options for displaying posts, the next items are being worked on:

• Consider adding a Term Query Loop Block.
• Add the choice to not repeat posts already shown by other Query Loop blocks displayed on the identical page.
• Query block: client-side pagination, powered by the Interactivity API.

Footnotes

Introduced in WordPress 6.3, the Footnotes block continues to evolve with more design tooling available and custom post-type compatibility work:

• Add typography, dimensions, and border block supports.
• Add link, background, and text color support.
• Ensure compatibility with Custom Post Types.

Forward-Considering Leadership

Harkening back to what we first saw with the discharge of WordPress 5.6, “Simone,” on December 8, 2020, the event of WordPress 6.4 is being led entirely by a team of self-identifying women, nonbinary, and gender-expansive contributors.

The total inclusiveness of this leadership model is consistent with the open and collaborative nature of WordPress, where contributions from anyone, no matter how they discover themselves, are welcomed.

Comfortable Anniversary

WordPress 6.4 will likely be the ultimate release of the CMS in 2023, a 12 months that marks the twentieth anniversary of the primary version, affectionately nicknamed “Davis” after jazz musician Miles Davis, which debuted on May 27, 2003. Version 6.4 will likely be the forty eighth release of WordPress, and while this content management system has already come a great distance since its inception, its open-source structure and collaborative spirit make sure that it’ll proceed to evolve and improve to empower people to create and manage their very own digital presence well into the longer term.