WordPress 5.9 is Here! Are You Ready?
WordPress is the leading content management system in the world. Millions of users, intuitive features, ease of use, and flexible content editing, make it the leading CMS in this field. If you’re still not sure what WordPress is used for, let’s say you can use it to build any site including a blog, portfolio, online store, or niche site with complete ease. Since WordPress is free, SEO friendly, and equipped with tons of features for complete beginners, anyone can use it with zero effort. Also, there are tons of resources for newbies, so if you need a beginner’s guide to WordPress, you will find tons of tips, tutorials, and examples with one click. To stay in the leading position, WordPress constantly improves. On the 14th of December, a new, upgraded version 5.9 was released! Let’s see what changes it brings!
From time to time, WordPress upgrades and brings new features. This time is not different. New updates will focus mostly on block options and full site editing features in Gutenberg. In short, full site editing helps you control the page content and global parts of the website. For instance, you can change a header or footer design while you work on the page content. Thus, you don’t have to leave the screen in order to make changes – you can use the same design tools. WordPress 5.9 promises better and easier web page creating with a block editor as well. Specifically, WordPress 5.9 will bring more improvements for the navigation menu block to boost user experience and its compatibility with versatile WordPress themes.
Additionally, this new release will bring several new, improved and consistent design tools. Plus, it will cover enhancements to colors, typography, and layouts. Moreover, WordPress 5.9 promises improved block interactions such as ListView drag and drop, improved inserter between blocks, block-level locking for patterns. Plus, you can expect a lighter navigation block experience, easy elements’ alignment, query block improvements. The main idea behind WordPress 5.9 is easier and faster customization. So, the tools that are on the way aim to let you change design elements like typography, spacing, and colors to your entire site at once.
When it comes to other upgrades, we want to mention a few more features. WordPress 5.9 promises active embeds for Pinterest, the ability to show login screens in different languages, an update to jQuery 3, etc.
Another upgrade we look forward to is the introduction of new block themes for Gutenberg. This will surely give users more flexibility and freedom. When it comes to default WordPress themes, there will be a change as well. WordPress 5.9 will likely be required to use Twenty Twenty-Two, as it is a block theme.
This lovely, beautifully designed theme is packed with amazing customization options and user-friendly features. Equipped with versatile color palettes, page templates, headers, and footers, so users will have everything they need at their disposal.
Featuring beautiful illustrations of birds in flight, refined typography such as Source Serif Pro, and gentle colors inspired by nature, Twenty Twenty-Two will surely work perfectly with WordPress 5.9.
Any upgrade aims to solve the existing bugs and offer a better user experience. WordPress 5.9 will bring a number of bug fixes.
Specifically, WordPress 5.9 has proposed the fix of the lazy-load on the very first content image or content iframe. Excluding featured images is also under discussion. In case you use Dark Mode, you already know that the widget screen also shows in Dark mode. Due to the bug, the widget text is gray on the white background, which makes it difficult to work with. In the new WordPress release, this will be solved as well.
The new WordPress 5.9 theme introduces many new and exciting features that allow you to fully edit and style your website. Let’s see what exactly is new and how to use this promising new WordPress theme.
The first thing you will notice when you go to your admin dashboard is that when you open the Appearance settings from the main sidebar menu, you can no longer see the variety of options that were used for editing header, sidebar, footer and other page elements. Only Editor (beta version for the time being) is in the menu, and everything is done through it.
When you click on the Editor, a post page opens. Click in the upper right corner to toggle the navigation and see how the new settings are organized.
You will see that there are now three different areas for editing – site, templates and template parts. The templates will be in our focus as they carry the most important options for the website editing in general.
So, let’s see the kind of options and settings that we can access in Templates. All the default pages that are typically found on a website are contained in Templates, meaning all the default settings for all the different default types of pages are here.
For example, when you want to add a new page to the website, all the settings and options related to it will be contained in the Page option in this menu.
The next option Archive, introduces the possibilities we didn’t have with the previous WP theme version. Archives pages are pages that are created by default for each taxonomy (categories and tags) and their purpose is to display each item in that taxonomy. With these options, you can edit all the archive pages easily. The Single Post option allows editing the post and so on as the items are displayed.
Before, when you installed a new theme, and added a page, the page already had some default value referring to its design – the padding, the elements that are mandatory and similar stuff and it was not possible to change and influence these premade settings. Now, everything is different, the full editing feature allows you to change anything you want to change on any page.
How do the templates work? Each time you create a new page, all the settings you adjusted in Templates will be applied to it. If for example, in Page settings, you added an image or made any other change in the header, footer, text, etc. these changes will take place every time you create that new specific page type, as these settings are now default settings for that page type. The same goes for all types of templates – Archive, Search, Home, etc. What you set in the Templates will be applied across all the pages of the same type across the website. Until now, that wasn’t possible.
Another very important aspect of the full-site editing feature is that it also allows you to edit specific template parts. In the Template Parts menu, you can access different template elements like header, footer, etc. What’s very important is that you can also add new elements to the template – you will notice the Add New button in the upper left corner.
Let’s say we want to add an image with a text to the template so that each new specific page type that is made with a specific template contains this new element. To avoid having to add that template part to each new page, we will add that specific template part to the desired template. After the template part is created it will be found in the post editor’s menu:
The template parts can be added on pages, but only on the specific template. From there, they will be applied on all the specific pages that are made with that template.
The new site editor includes the capacity to devise new styles for your theme which you can apply across the site. To access the new features you just need to click on the ‘style’ icon on the top right corner of your screen while editing. It is also possible to make changes to the styles of individual blocks used on the website. Stylewise, it is also interesting to explore new pattern possibilities that are now available with the new version.
These settings are accessible on individual pages as well as on templates. Similar settings were also available in Gutenberg, but the new version comes with more detailed, fine-tuned options for stylizing and adjusting specific parts of the website.
Stylewise, it is also interesting to explore new pattern possibilities that are now available with the new version. The WordPress Pattern Directory brings a wide spectrum of block patterns that allow you to beautify your pages more quickly. These patterns are editable too. Browse the pattern explorer to check out the newly added patterns – one click is all that it takes to insert a pattern.
Let’s Wrap It Up
If you use WordPress for a long time, you already know that each new release brings improvements that really make the difference. As the launch of WordPress 5.9 is getting closer, we are all excited to try it and enjoy great new improvements!
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
