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Latest WordPress Version
Version 6.6 is the latest WordPress version, released on July 16, 2024.
The significance of WordPress updates
WordPress rolls out timely updates to ensure secure software and to meet wordpress user requests. Updating to the latest version lets you stay updated on the latest features, improving your WordPress website’s performance and functionality. Here are a few reasons why wordpress updates are important:
- To ensure the website is secure from potential threats, regular updates can safeguard against hackers trying to get through any loopholes in the system. This can also protect your website from other cyber threats and malware attacks.
- You need to update to the latest versions of your site for better functioning. This can improve website load times and efficiently enhance the user experience. Minor bugs can adversely affect the user experience. Fixing these issues makes your website perform better.
- The updated features improve the website’s performance by meeting user requests. You can customize your website with the latest features to make it user-friendly. The theme and plugin updates fix compatibility issues with the latest WordPress versions.
Did you know that each WordPress version is named after a Jazz musician? WordPress developers honor these artists out of their fondness for jazz music. Hence, all major releases are named after jazz musicians.
Three Major Releases
A significant highlight of the WordPress roadmap for 2024 is the plan for three major releases, the first two of which were released in April and July 2024. While the dates for the upcoming releases is subject to change, they provide a rough timeline for the new features and improvements that will be introduced throughout the year.
1. WordPress 6.5 (April 2)
WordPress 6.5 rolled out on April 2nd, 2024. This version is named ‘Regina’ after the eminent American Jazz violinist Regina Carter. WordPress version 6.5 features a suite of enhancements designed specifically for both the users and developers that refine the experience of using WordPress altogether. However, speed is still one of the primary aims, and built-in translations help to make loading times faster, especially for multilingual sites.
This version update aims to provide a flawless, user-friendly experience with more than 110 performance updates. It has faster input processing speed and loading than WordPress 6.4. Compared to previous versions, this version provides performance enhancements in translated sites with an improvement load speed.
The introduction of the Font Library allows you to customize website fonts with custom typography options. The cover block feature helps with automatic overlay colour selection based on the chosen image. This, along with setting aspect ratios and manual color selection, enhanced the visual aspect. Block label customization, link control for managing links, upgraded classic themes, tracking the history of changes made to style, interactivity API to develop interactive and engaging designs, etc., are some of the design features in this version that guarantee to enhance user engagement.
On the collaboration front, the new update includes significant enhancements to the Gutenberg editor, working towards creating a more cooperative and user-friendly content creation environment.
AVIF image format support is another exciting feature in this update. This feature’s speciality is that even if the file size is small, users can enjoy better-quality images. Additionally, data views in the site editor for an efficient editing experience, HTML API updates to change modifiable text without changing the document structure, and block hooks updates are some of the features in this version.
2. WordPress 6.6 (July 16)
Launched on July 16th, the 6.6 update is named Dorsey, after the American musician, Jazz trombonist, and bandleader of the big band era, Tommy Dorsey. This update is packed with new features to enhance performance and provide a creative and better site-building experience.
The pattern override feature enables users to make changes to certain parts of the website without disrupting the uniform website style. The grid block feature helps with a simplified content layout by helping add custom rows and columns, unlike earlier where you have to use row and column blocks to create a grid. This also reduces HTML bloat. You also have the option to preview the page before editing in the site editor.
The plugin auto-update feature comes along with the rollback option to ensure safety. The auto-update feature ensures that the plugin is updated to the latest version; however, if there is any problem with the new version, the rollback option restores the plugin to a previous version.
The 6.6 update has performance-enhancing updates such as removing WP-Theme-JSON calls that are repetitive, the addition of a new data-wp-on-async directive, and a fix on lazy loading posts. Additionally, the template loading time has been reduced by 35%. The new release is packed with 58 accessibility fixes and enhancements.
Set for the July 16, 2024 launch, WordPress version is a stabilization and polish release aimed at improving the performance quality by eliminating bugs while increasing the overall user experience.
Users and developers can expect a faster, smoother, and more reliable WordPress as a result of the refined codebase. Fixes to existing functionality will also improve stability and consistency across the CMS.
While the current plan is to forgo significant feature development, there has been some discussion about potentially shifting the focus. This could allow some initial collaboration tools, slated for 6.5, to slip into the 6.6 timeline instead.
6.6 represents a valuable opportunity to upgrade sites to a polished version of WordPress before the more ambitious changes proposed for 6.7. For those managing or developing on the platform, it’s a chance to move to something more stable and reliable before continuing to build.
6.6 promises to improve quality across the board for WordPress sites. For users, that means a smoother experience. For developers, an easier-to-work-with foundation. And for the web as a whole, a more solid and well-vetted core content management system.
3. WordPress 6.7 (November 5)
The upcoming WordPress 6.7 release promises continued enhancements aimed at improving the user experience, security, performance and extensibility of the world’s most popular content management system.
Building on advancements introduced in version 6.6, the block editor is likely to see further refinements focused on streamlining workflow, collaboration and design flexibility for content creators. Code and resource optimization will also be an area of focus, with improvements aimed at boosting site speed and stability.
Staying true to WordPress’ commitment to security, developers will continue hardening core code against vulnerabilities as well as introducing updated authentication mechanisms and user management tools.
Finally, this release is set to bring additions and improvements to the WordPress REST API, enhancing integration capabilities and flexibility for developers looking to build innovative custom solutions, themes and plugins to power diverse web projects.
Entering the Third Stage of the Gutenberg Project
In 2024, the Gutenberg project enters an exciting new phase focused on enhancing collaboration and streamlining teamwork in WordPress. Phase 3 introduces real-time co-editing capabilities that allow multiple content creators and developers to simultaneously access and edit the same documents, websites, and custom themes.
Users can now work together in real-time, accelerating workflows. The new features facilitate leaving commentary, feedback, and reviewing changes with colleagues and clients right within the editing experience. Teams can brainstorm ideas, outline content, write posts, and tweak website designs side-by-side, enabling greater efficiency, transparency and alignment.
This shift to lightweight, in-platform collaboration tools aims to reduce reliance on separate review and feedback cycles that can hamper productivity. Instead, Gutenberg looks to unite the stages of content creation and web development, allowing cooperative workflows that mirror modern, agile work environments. With Phase 3, WordPress continues its innovation lead in how diverse teams access, edit, and publish web content and customizations.
Features and Improvements to Expect
While the roadmap provides a general outline of what to expect from WordPress in 2024, it’s essential to explore the specific features and improvements that will enhance the platform’s functionality and user experience. Here are some key areas to look out for:
1. Typography Management
With the 6.5 release, WordPress will introduce built-in typography management tools. Site owners and developers will have access to an extensive font library from which they can choose typefaces to brand and style their sites. The inclusion of these diverse font options will enable deeper personalization and customization of site designs. Additionally, developers will have the ability to build plugins that inject new fonts into the library, vastly expanding typographic possibilities for original and creative applications.
2. Real-Time Collaboration
Phase 3 of the groundbreaking Gutenberg project promises to equip WordPress with real-time collaboration capabilities. Site contributors will finally be able to simultaneously work on the same document—Whether planning a new site architecture, developing a post, or managing menus—together in real time. The addition of functionalities like live editing, commenting, and centralized feedback will drastically smooth out team workflows and content creation processes. Groups will work in closer unity regardless of location or time.
3. Publishing Workflows
To optimize the entire publishing process from start to finish, WordPress is gearing up to introduce robust publishing workflows. Once implemented, users will have the tools to construct advanced publishing logic around their content production and distribution pipelines. For example, site managers could require that all posts include imagery, customized excerpts,
or categories, and reviewer sign-offs before going live. These publish-time rules will inject integrity and organization into publishing endeavours of all sizes.
4. Enhanced Post Revisions
The upcoming post-revision engine will provide an entirely new level of editing and version control flexibility. Users will gain the ability to roll back changes on a highly granular level—With precision down to individual blocks and components. Writers, editors, and site managers could update multiple sections of an article simultaneously while still preserving important pieces requiring additional rework. Unlike anything WordPress has offered to date, these augmented revision tracking capabilities will simplify editorial processes across the CMS.
5. Updated Media and Asset Library
In 2024, WordPress will completely reimagine the media experience with tools for organizing, discovering, manipulating, and attributing media files. The upcoming media library will allow for tagging and grouping assets based on factors like file formats, creation dates, and licensing rights. Advanced search and filtering functions will enable quick access to files. Additionally, the new editing interface will provide intuitive controls over image cropping, colour correction, and metadata. By introducing these enhancements, WordPress aims to help publishers wrangle diverse media repositories and efficiently edit images all from within the CMS dashboard itself.
6. Search and Command Prompt
Picking up on the latest trends in software user experience (UX) design, WordPress plans to bake prompt-based search and command functionalities directly into its core platform. This addition will allow users to quickly pull up files, settings, and content or execute custom actions through a simple text-based interface within WordPress. With faster access to key controls and information via prompt queries, users can forego traditional menu clicks and realize huge time savings. These intelligent prompt capabilities promise to streamline workflows and heighten productivity across the board.
7. Community Input
True to its open-source and community-centric roots, WordPress actively solicits feedback and feature requests from its diverse global user base during platform development cycles. In shaping phase 3 of the ambitious Gutenberg project, WordPress has placed extra emphasis on gathering insights from everyday users, subject matter experts, and industry partners.
Certain functionality desires have risen to the top. Groups have voiced strong interest in multi-tiered collaboration workflows allowing both broad and restricted access, shareable public preview links for gathering feedback prior to formal publishing, deep integrations with popular team communication tools like Slack and Trello, and more granular tracking of changes extending beyond written content to other site components.
History of WordPress releases
Let’s have a quick peek at the past WordPress releases and their features.
| WordPress version | Version name | Release date | Important version features |
| WordPress 4.2 | Bud Powell | April 23, 2015 | improved customizer, new embeds, and updated plugin system. ‘Press this’ feature to edit and share the content, character support for various languages, emoji support, switch themes and preview from customizer, more embeds, and new plugin updates. |
| WordPress 4.3 | Billie Holiday | August 18, 2015 | Improved security with better passwords, site icons to represent your brand, and New formatting shortcuts. Create and preview menu in customizer, with a mobile-friendly interface. |
| WordPress 4.4 | Clifford Brown | December 8, 2015 | Introduced the ‘Twenty Sixteen’ theme. Responsive images, new embeds feature, and other under the hood updates. |
| WordPress 4.5 | Coleman Hawkins | April 12, 2016 | Improvements in editing like inline linking and added formatting shortcuts. Customization improvements such as live responsive previews in customizer and custom logo support. Smart image resizing, selective refresh and more under the hood updates. |
| WordPress 4.6 | Pepper Adams | August 16, 2016 | Streamlined updates, used native fonts for better performance, editor improvements such as Inline link checker and easy content recovery. Resource hints, robust requests, translations on demand and more updates under the hood. |
| WordPress 4.7 | Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan | December 6, 2016 | Introduced the new default theme for 2017, the ‘Twenty Seventeen.’ Customize your site while previewing with edit shortcuts, Add custom CSS, Smooth menu building, PDF thumbnail previews, view the dashboard in your preferred language, and Introduction of the REST API Content Endpoints are the major updates. The page template for all post types, customized changesets, and more developer updates. |
| WordPress 4.8 | William John “Bill” Evans | June 8, 2017 | New widget updates like the image widget, video widget, audio widget, and rich text widget. Link boundaries for editing links and the events and news section on the dashboard to get updates on WordPress events. |
| WordPress 4.9 | Billy Tipton | November 15, 2017 | This update includes customizations to draft and schedule site design changes. With the new update, you can send design preview links to collaborate and get feedbacks. Design locking feature to guard your design changes, autosave prompt, and widget for syntax highlighting and error checking for CSS editing, sandbox for safety, warning messages before editing themes and plugins to ensure safe edit, new gallery widget, add media button in text widget, reliable theme switching, and the search and preview themes from within the customizer are some of the important updates. |
| WordPress 5.0 | Bebo Valdés | December 6, 2018 | Introduced Gutenberg, the new block-based editor. The update has a new default theme, ‘Twenty Nineteen’, designed for the new block editor. The theme comes with a versatile design and simple layout using system fonts. |
| WordPress 5.1 | Betty Carter | February 21, 2019 | Improved editor performance, Introduced ‘Site Health’ features |
| WordPress 5.2 | Jaco Pastorius | May 7, 2019 | PHP error protection, more accessibility updates, new dashboard icons, checks for plugin compatibility with the site’s PHP version. |
| WordPress 5.3 | Rahsaan Roland Kirk | November 12, 2019 | Improvements in block editor, expanded design flexibility, new default theme – Twenty Twenty, automatic image rotation, improved site health check, admin email verification. |
| WordPress 5.4 | Nat Adderley | March 31, 2020 | Addition of new blocks, clean UI, better block navigation, and improved privacy features. |
| WordPress 5.5 | Billy Eckstine | August 11, 2020 | Enhanced speed with lazy loading images, included XML sitemap, auto-updates for plugins and themes, new block patterns and block directory, and inline image editing. |
| WordPress 5.6 | Nina Simone | December 8, 2020 | Default theme – Twenty Twenty-One. More block patterns, more tools to edit layout and better video captioning. The automatic update option is made easily accessible to all. Built-in block patterns in default themes. |
| WordPress 5.7 | Esperanza Spalding | March 9, 2021 | A new editor with font-size adjustment, reusable blocks, a drag-and-drop block inserter, and more block editor changes. A single-click site switch from HTTP to HTTPS, a new Robots API, lazy load for iFrames, and a new color palette. |
| WordPress 5.8 | Art Tatum | July 20, 2021 | Blocks are used in widget management, displaying posts with new blocks, using block editors to edit templates, providing a page structure overview, colourizing images, and using the pattern transformation tool to suggest patterns for blocks. |
| WordPress 5.9 | Joséphine Baker | January 25, 2022 | Introduced the first default block theme, Twenty Twenty-Two. Full site editing, a personal paintbox, a navigation block, better block controls, a pattern directory, an updated list view, and a better gallery block. |
| WordPress 6.0 | Arturo O’Farrill | May 24, 2022 | Improvements in the writing experience with new features and styles, style variations in block themes, new design tools, improved list view, more template options for block themes, a lock blocks feature with block locking controls, and other updated features for better accessibility and performance enhancement. |
| WordPress 6.1 | Mikhail “Misha” Alperin | November 1, 2022 | The new default theme is the Twenty Twenty-Three. Other important updates include new templates, design tool updates, updated options for managing menus, cleaner layouts, improved block placeholders, list and quote blocks with inner block support, fluid typography, updated theme directory with filter for block themes and pattern preview, and suggested starter patterns for new pages. A new toggle key is added to apply lock settings to all the blocks inside. |
| WordPress 6.2 | Dolphy | March 29, 2023 | Updated site editor interface with better template previews, feature to edit menus with the navigation block, updated block settings sidebar with settings and styles tab, and new header and footer patterns. In this update, the Openverse is integrated into WordPress. The other updates include a distraction-free mode for focused writing and a new style block with an overview of how the block looks in the site library. With this edit, you can copy and paste styles from one block to the other blocks and customise the site’s appearance with custom CSS and design tools. |
| WordPress 6.3 | Lionel | August 8, 2023 | Content, pattern, and template management in site editor. Block theme previews, create and sync patterns, switch templates, and open editor preferences easily with the command palette. New design tools, track design changes, add and link footnotes with footnotes block. Details block to show/hide content. 170+ performance updates and 50+ accessibility improvements. |
| WordPress 6.4 | Shirley | November 7, 2023 | Introduced the default theme Twenty Twenty-Four. New features to enhance the writing experience. Organize patterns with custom categories, updated command palette, and advanced filtering in patterns. Lightbox functionality, renaming group blocks, image previews in list view, import and export patterns as JSON files, block hooks, and more design tools are included in this update. |
| WordPress 6.5 | Regina | April 2, 2024 | A new font library to style your content, updated background and shadow tools to enhance the visual elements, and enhanced link controls for easy link management. You can view all revisions in this update, including template and template parts. The update’s other significant features are the easy drag-and-drop feature and the new data views. |
| WordPress 6.6 | Dorsey | July 16, 2024 | Adding design options to block themes, preview pages in the site editor with a side-by-side layout, plugin auto update features with rollbacks, and pattern override features maintaining consistency in style. Besides, it has around 58 accessibility fixes and more performance enhancement updates. |
Conclusion
In the end, WordPress roadmap 2024 gives a glimpse into an exciting ride for the platform and its users. WordPress will continue to develop and adapt in light of the three major releases: collaboration highlights and focus on developing strengths. The new features and enhancements planned for the future include typography management and real-time collaboration that will make working with WordPress a more effective experience.
With the slog towards 2024, we must recall that plans are malleable, while adjustments can be implemented as necessary. Indeed, the commitment of the WordPress community to an outstanding user experience remains unbroken. Therefore, fasten your seat belts and enjoy as the most creative year with WordPress begins.
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