The excitement is building for all WordPress users! The eagerly awaited update to WordPress 6.4 "Shirley" is now available and promises lots of new features and improvements. The update has been available since November 7, 2023. With a completely new theme, versatile editor features, and even new blocks, there's a lot to get excited about. You can also display your images in a whole new way and create a faster website with minimal effort. Sound interesting? Then let's take a look at what's in store for us with the 6.4 update!
Note: Before every update, always create a backup of your entire WordPress website to undo any data loss or problems after the update. You can also hire a WordPress agency such as this:matters to help you with this and to thoroughly test updates before going live with your WordPress site.
WordPress 6.4: The most important features at a glance
WordPress 6.4 is the third and final comprehensive update of 2023. With this major update, the community enters the third phase of Gutenberg, also known as the "collaboration phase." In addition to normal further development, this third phase focuses largely on collaboration in WordPress. At the end of this phase, it should be possible to work together on a post or page, as you may already be familiar with from Google Docs. With a strong focus on new features, a versatile default theme, and improved performance, this update aims to optimize every aspect of your creative journey—from website layout and design to creating new content.
Here are some of the highlights of WordPress 6.4:
- Versatile default theme: A new, flexible default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four, brings together the best of WordPress. It offers a wide range of templates that you can customize and tailor to your brand.
- Lightbox functionality for images: Activate the lightbox function for images to enable an impressive presentation of your images.
- Font library: With the new font library, using and managing fonts on your website is a breeze. Regardless of the theme you are currently using, the font library is accessible to all users.
- Custom categories for templates: Organize your WordPress templates, also known as "patterns," into your own custom categories. You can find them all intuitively with an improved filter function in the template area.
- Writing improvements: New keyboard shortcuts in the editor, seamless list merging, and better control over your link settings are just some of the improvements for working in the block editor.
- Redesigned command palette: A revamped command palette helps you complete tasks more efficiently and improve your workflow.
- New features for block grouping: Name grouped blocks and assign them a background image to make it easier to organize and distinguish different areas of your content.
- New gallery and image preview: With the new gallery and image previews in list view, you can see the media elements of your content at a glance and find them more easily.
- Advanced design tools: Create beautiful and functional layouts with an advanced set of design tools. Experiment with background images in group blocks, keep image dimensions consistent with placeholder aspect ratios, and add buttons to your navigation block without custom CSS.
- Block hooks for developers: So-called block hooks enable developers to automatically insert blocks at their chosen positions. This ensures improved extensibility through plugins.
- 70 accessibility updates: These changes include significant improvements to the list view, Aria label support for the navigation block, and updates to the admin user interface.
- More than 100 performance updates: These focus on performance when loading templates for classic themes and block themes, the use of the "defer" and "async" script loading strategies, and the optimization of automatically loaded options.
These extensive improvements and innovations make WordPress 6.4 a significant update that is of interest to both website operators and developers. It is another important step in the continuous development of WordPress to offer users an ever better and more efficient platform for their websites.
A new default theme: Twenty Twenty-Four
Twenty Twenty-Four is the brand new default theme that will be introduced with WordPress 6.4. It is a versatile yet simple WordPress theme designed specifically for three user groups: small businesses, photographers & artists, and authors & bloggers. However, thanks to its flexibility and versatile templates, the new default theme can also be used for almost any other purpose.
The Twenty Twenty-Four theme does not add any additional features to your website. Instead, it offers a range of Gutenberg Editor templates and patterns that you can combine to design a wide variety of websites (full site editing). It also includes a wealth of predefined content with numerous practical examples of page structures. You can edit these quickly and easily and customize them to suit your needs.
A long-awaited feature: the lightbox function
An integrated lightbox for pages and posts was long overdue, and with WordPress 6.4, users can finally enjoy this feature without having to install an additional plugin. The new WordPress version takes the approach that images are a central component of any good narrative. With the new lightbox feature, your images can now be displayed in a larger format when visitors click on the image. This allows you to present impressive images without them taking up too much space and crowding out other content.
The new lightbox feature is still quite rudimentary and is in an early stage of development. For the gallery block, for example, you have to make each individual setting for each image rather than for the entire gallery. Nevertheless, the introduction of the lightbox is an important milestone in WordPress development that many users have been waiting for for a long time.
New font library
WordPress 6.4 gives you access to the newly developed font library. This was developed with the aim of making it as easy as possible to use fonts on your website in the future. It also offers integration options for plugins. It doesn't matter which theme is currently active – the font library is also available to all users.
This new feature ensures that you, as a website operator, can select exactly the fonts you need for your website. The font library works in a similar way to WordPress's established media library, making it intuitive and user-friendly.
Improvements in the block editor
Similar to previous versions, the new version WordPress 6.4 focuses heavily on improving and expanding existing block editor and Gutenberg features. Preparations for phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which focuses more on collaboration, are already in full swing. The main focus is on collaboration, for example, writing a post or page together.
As a WordPress user, you can look forward to many improvements when writing, including new keyboard shortcuts, smooth list merging, and improved control over your link settings. A redesigned toolbar also provides consistent and organized access to the tools that many of us work with every day.
A newly designed command palette and new commands help you complete tasks efficiently and speed up your workflow. In addition, the new gallery and image previews in list view allow you to identify and locate media content at a glance. Below is an overview of some of the most important block editor features in WordPress 6.4.
Improved command palette
The WordPress 6.3 update already introduced a new command palette that allows us to quickly enter commands using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+K. WordPress 6.4 offers a number of improvements to this tool as well as new keyboard shortcuts for an expanded range of functions. There is also a subtle design update that makes the elements appear slightly darker so that they stand out better from their background.
The new commands and actions for working with blocks are also particularly interesting. You can duplicate, convert, delete, or insert blocks using the command palette. You now also have the option of selecting multiple blocks at once and transforming them using the command palette.
Optimized list view
The list view in the editor now allows you to search through your page content and perform various actions on blocks, groups, and patterns. These actions include copying, duplicating, grouping, and much more. The new features are particularly useful for complex structures with nested blocks, as you can show and hide groups of elements and perform multiple actions on individual blocks, groups, and patterns.
Open links in a new tab
In the previous version of WordPress, the "Open in a new tab" option was moved to the link settings under the "Advanced" menu item. This meant that a few extra clicks were required to set a link to open in a new tab. Based on user feedback, a new checkbox has now been added to the link preview modal, making it easy to open a link in a new tab again. It's always nice to see developers taking user feedback to heart.
Introduction of Block Hooks
Block hooks (formerly known as auto-inserting blocks) allow plugins to interact automatically with the Gutenberg editor. Specifically, block hooks enable a block to be automatically placed in a specific position as soon as another block is added to the content. WordPress 6.4 will introduce block hook functionality for developers. This would allow plugins to automatically add blocks when activated.
Named after the hooks used in the WordPress core, block hooks allow plugin developers to interact with the block editor and extend blocks without manipulating them directly. For example, a membership plugin can now add a login button to the navigation menu. The block panel shows you which blocks are added by plugins and gives you the option to activate or deactivate them.
Accessibility improvements
The WordPress 6.4 update includes 70 accessibility improvements, including optimized button positioning, expanded context for "Create" links, and updated speak() messages in the website status area. In addition, bugs when editing images in the media library have been fixed, as have error messages in the login form, and a "no motion" setting for GIFs has been added. Users without JavaScript now also receive a direct link to install the Classic Editor plugin.
Performance optimizations in WordPress 6.4 and information for developers
With more than 100 performance-related changes, WordPress 6.4 focuses on performance. These include improvements to template loading, the use of defer and async when loading scripts, and new features to optimize the use of automatically loaded options. Below are some of the most important performance improvements in the 6.4 update.
Script loading strategies
The script loading strategies introduced in WordPress 6.3 offer a solution to prevent unexpected loading of scripts in the wrong order in the script dependency tree by using the async and defer attributes. With WordPress 6.4, these strategies are applied to front-end scripts in core and themes. In addition, starting with this version, scripts that use the defer attribute are moved from the footer to the head. This allows for earlier detection of scripts during the loading process and faster execution after the document is loaded.
Disabling the attachment page for media
With WordPress 6.4, attachment pages will be completely disabled for new WordPress installations. Prior to this version, WordPress automatically created an attachment page for each uploaded multimedia file, which was not useful on many websites. These "content" pages were indexed by search engines and could lead to a poor user experience.
To deactivate the attachment page of existing WordPress sites, a setting in the database or in wp-options is required after the update. Please note, however, that you should test this change in a staging area beforehand.
Loading templates
The _register_theme_block_patterns() function was used prior to WordPress 6.4 to register all templates provided by the active theme in the "patterns" directory. Due to the extensive file operations required by this function, its use caused intensive resource consumption, which was particularly noticeable in themes with many templates, such as Twenty Twenty-Four.
To solve this problem, WordPress 6.4 introduces the new function _wp_get_block_patterns(), which stores templates in a temporary cache. Thanks to this new function, subsequent requests no longer need to search for files, resulting in significant performance improvements.
Reduction of unnecessary queries
Some functions in the Themes API performed multiple checks for the existence of files in a child theme before returning to the parent theme. This was inefficient because these functions did not take into account whether the current theme was a child theme or not. Several functions and methods of the Themes API have therefore been updated. These now check whether the stylesheet directory of the current theme matches the template directory before continuing with the check for the existence of files, which can lead to significant performance improvements, especially for themes that are not child themes.
Performance optimization for options
Options are loaded automatically by default. However, with a large number of options, this can lead to slow server response times and errors. To prevent this, WordPress 6.4 provides plugin developers with new features that allow them to manage options, improve performance, and set a different default behavior.
Conclusion on WordPress 6.4
Basically, it can be said that WordPress 6.4 represents a significant advancement with new features, a new default theme, and more than 100 performance improvements. The optimization of unnecessary queries and improved performance of options offer additional potential for more efficient use and faster websites. With its planned release on November 7, 2023, this version not only brings a host of new features and improvements, but also continues the upward trend in Core Web Vitals performance.
Furthermore, significant progress has been made in terms of the Gutenberg editor's usability and functionality, paving the way for the third phase. If you need help implementing the new features or have questions about WordPress, the team at this:matters is happy to assist you. As experts in WordPress, content, and SEO, we are happy to help you take your online presence to the next level and achieve your goals. We rely on modern tools, clear communication, and our expertise in online marketing to achieve measurable results for your business. Contact us now for a no-obligation inquiry to learn how you can get the most out of your WordPress website!
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