What’s new in WordPress 6.0

WordPress 6.0 was released earlier this week, and it is the second major release of 2022.

Several notable updates, which you can read more about in the following sections, include:

• Faster website performance
• Page creation patterns
• Block locking
• Global style variations
• Ability to select text across multiple blocks

Some of the changes, like faster website performance, will be felt immediately. Others, like the brand new page creation patterns, are features for theme developers to roll out.

WordPress 6.0 Is An Incremental Update

WordPress 6.0 is the culmination of the work of over 500 people in at least 58 countries, encompassing close to 1,000 improvements.

Ordinarily, when a product undergoes a version change, like a new Android phone model, end-users expect to see dramatic changes. That’s not really the case with WordPress version changes.

While this is a “dot 0” release, version 6.0 is best understood as part of a series of incremental improvements meant to preserve backward compatibility while also introducing improvements.

WordPress 6.0 is a version number change but it’s not on the scale of a revamp. The publishing experience between versions 5.9 and 6 is improved.

New Features That End Users Will Love

Page Creation Patterns

One of the most important changes is the Page Creation Patterns feature.

Ordinarily, when creating a web page a publisher might start with a blank layout. Page creation patterns is a way to select from multiple layouts as a starting point.

The WordPress core itself won’t ship with the layouts, this is something that theme developers need to build into their themes.

Block Locking

Block Locking is a feature that prevents an end-user from accidentally deleting or moving an important block. The new feature is available through a block settings drop-down menu.

Export Your Block Theme with All The Changes

WordPress 6.0 now allows you to save and export all the changes you made to your block theme.

WordPress will prepare a theme zip file that includes all the changes you made using the full site editor. You can then download and install that theme on any other WordPress website.

Multi-Select: Select Text Across Multiple Blocks

In the new blocked-based WordPress editors, creating a web page layout is done using what’s called blocks, building blocks, so to speak.

Blocks are like containers where content can be inserted. Content can be images, text, whatever.

An example of an incremental but exciting change in WordPress 6.0 is the ability to select text across multiple content blocks.

This allows a user to select the content within multiple blocks without selecting multiple blocks themselves. This gives publishers the ability to write and control content in an expected manner, contributing to a more intuitive writing experience.

Style Variations

Another exciting new feature is called Global Style Variations.

Style variations allows theme authors to provide their customers a way to easily change the look and feel of their website without having to edit CSS or HTML, dramatically speeding up the process of getting a website up and running.

This is a feature that is implemented on the WordPress theme developer side which improves the WordPress publishing experience for end users.

Copy Image URL from Media Library List View

If you view your media library in the list view, then you can now see a ‘Copy URL to clipboard’ link below each image and media file.

WordPress Full Site Editor Beta Label

Something that may be useful to consider about WordPress 6.0 is that the Full Site Editor (FSE) is still labeled as Beta.

WordPress 6.0 improves the editing experience for the end users by making the process of writing easier as well as making it easier to dream up unique website layouts without having to deal with code. But FSE is still considered as a Beta product.