On December 14th, 2021 WordPress 5.9 is scheduled to be released. This 3rd major release of 2021 has several new features, which are important to know as WordPress site owners and/or developers. Keep reading to explore these new feature updates below.
Twenty Twenty-Two: The Latest Default Theme
The predecessor, Twenty Twenty-One was rolled out earlier this year in WordPress 5.6 and was designed for beginners and experts. This SEO-friendly theme features colorful palettes and block patterns. The Twenty Twenty-Two theme provides full site editing and customizable capabilities. On top of that, six new pre-designed palette colors are being released as well. Full site editing combined with being able to change your theme’s appearance has been creating quite the feedback from users.
Gutenberg Navigation Block
The Navigation Block may arguably be one of the most impactful theme blocks created. This block theme is being designed to optimize the user experience when building simple navigation menus. It’s crucial for designers to be able to switch between block types in the navigation context using transforms. Previously, the navigation block struggled to do the simplest of menus and common flow but focused more on the complex navigation. This new update will provide the mild course correction that is needed to fix these issues. Additionally, this update will start the course for pattern-driven abilities so that the user is able to replace user content no matter the layout chosen.
Edit Flows for Block Themes
Also with the Gutenberg development is the refining of edit flows and block themes on your pages and posts. Being able to change the font, colors, and layout is a great way to enhance your web design to look more personalized. There will also be the ability to edit and create your own theme templates as well as edit certain parts of templates such as the headers and footers.
Interface for theme.json
In WordPress 5.8 we saw the introduction of this interface for theme.json. Currently this interface is just a placeholder in the plugins, however the idea concept of WordPress 5.9 is to add a Styles graphic interface so users can add their personal style to their websites. New tools will be introduced such as dimension and spacing tools, typography tools and UI updates.
As with any new update be sure to test it out on a staging site before going live on your site. Additionally make sure you do a backup to ensure you do not lose anything before using this new update. Although sometimes a new update seems like more work than it does good there are lots of new and exciting things coming to WordPress. If you are in the marketing for an affordable WordPress hosting and support, Truly WP is here to provide you with everything you need to make your website successful.