This week was the official release of WordPress 6.0. The release was named after Grammy award-winning Latin jazz and Afro-Cuban jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill, who has a website running none other than WordPress!
What a great reminder, of how WordPress powers many independent websites.
UI updates in WordPress 6.0
Users who upgrade to WordPress 6.0 can expect changes. Improvements are mostly to how they interact with creating pages on their websites.
With new functionality including:
- Now able to select text across blocks, and edit them at once.
- New keyboard shortcuts like:
[[which will open the link menu. - New design tools like new color panel, border controls, and more.
- Users can now lock a block, to help prevent accidental movement or removal of a block, once it is locked.
- Blocks will retain styles when changing block type.
- Block themes can now include multiple style variations, making it easy to change multiple settings like color, font, and other options on the fly.
- Five new template options for author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy.
- Increased visibility of patterns menu.
Aside from UI updates to site editing, there were also numerous improvements made by two important teams.
Other updates in WordPress 6.0
The WordPress Accessibility team outlined dozens of improvements toward accessibility that made it into WordPress 6.0.
The WordPress Performance team also included numerous improvements to help improve the performance of WordPress websites with over 10,000 users, improve the handling of multiple data taxonomies within WordPress, as well as add new additions to the WordPress caching API.
There is also a long tail of bug fixes (131), enhancements and feature requests (97), and other bugs finally closed with the release of WordPress 6.0. If you are a developer, or just enjoy reading the nitty-gritty details, then you can check out the WordPress 6.0 Release Field Guide for more information.
Should I update to WordPress 6.0?
So, with all of these great features and improvements should you update your site to 6.0 right away?
There is no reason to rush feature updates on your websites. Unlike security releases, feature-related updates can be managed at your leisure.
Set aside the time in your schedule to test the sites you are upgrading. And take your time to test things out. Remember, backup your site’s files and the database before you update as well, just in case you need to revert the changes.
Of course, if there are any newly identified security bugs in WordPress core and a security release is made public., then you should be planning to quickly get your sites updated. Perhaps then would be a good time to move up from 5.9 to the 6.0 branch.
Just don’t forget to back up your site’s files and databases before performing that update, just in case.
You can keep up to date on WordPress security releases by installing the Patchstack plugin or keeping an eye on the WordPress Security Releases page.
