As Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg teased in a January blog post, our team at WordPress.com is working hard to enhance our developer experience. Improving what you see in your dashboard when you log into WordPress.com is one of our biggest goals.
Today, we’re excited to unveil a more powerful wp-admin experience (if you know, you know), which will soon be available to all sites on Creator and Entrepreneur plans. Read on to find out how to get early access.
Don’t call it a comeback
For many years, the default view for WordPress.com users has been a modernized, more friendly version of the classic WordPress experience. Around the office, we call this interface “Calypso.” It offers sleek post/page management, easy profile edits, built-in tips and resources for starting or growing your site, and more.
While the Calypso interface is ideal for some folks, we’ve heard from a lot of developers that you’d prefer easy access to the classic WordPress dashboard experience. So, we’re doing just that by making it possible for wp-admin to be the default view when you log in.
Our mission here is to empower our power users—those on Creator and Entrepreneur plans—to leverage WordPress to its fullest. This update promises:
Enhanced flexibility: Tailor your interface to seamlessly match your workflow.
A familiar, WordPress-centric experience: Enjoy an interface that feels right at home, mirroring the robust capabilities you expect from other WordPress hosts.
Superior management for complex sites: Handle sophisticated sites and client projects with ease.
While this initial launch is for Creator and Entrepreneur subscribers, our commitment extends to all WordPress.com users. We’re excited about the possibility of expanding these features to everyone in the future.
Join the early access list
To access the wp-admin interface you know and love, please join our email list below to be considered for early access.
WordCamp Asia 2024 is just a few days away—starting on March 7 in Taipei, Taiwan. This unique three-day summit will feature a distinguished lineup of speakers, numerous networking opportunities, and a closing Q&A experience with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. The live Q&A session will be streamed for WordPress enthusiasts worldwide, beginning at 3:30 p.m. China Standard Time (7:30 a.m. UTC) on Saturday, March 9, 2024.
If you want to participate, please submit your question via Slido from March 7 until about 10:00 a.m. UTC on Friday, March 8.
Given the expected volume of submitted questions, only some will be answered live, while others will be covered in a follow-up post published after the event on make.wordpress.org/project.
Explore the impact you can make on WordPress without coding in this WordPress Briefing episode hosted by Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy. She’ll guide you through diverse non-coding contributions suitable for all skill levels, including content translation, photo submissions, event organization, and software testing. Listen and discover how you can enhance the WordPress community in ways that align with your interests and expertise.
[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.
[00:00:29] (Intro music)
[00:00:40] Josepha: At the end of this week, WordCamp Asia is happening. It’s one of our largest events dedicated to WordPress, and it will cover a wide range of topics. From advanced concepts like running thriving businesses to more beginner things like building your first theme, there is bound to be something for you at this event.
For folks who have the opportunity to attend in person, you might also be going to your first-ever Contributor Day. Now, as much as I want there to be something for everyone there, I recognize that it’s a little more frenetic than your average WordPress event. It’s not any less welcoming than the event that has like a schedule and, tracks, and rooms.
[00:01:19] Josepha: But in my experience of any group of open source contributors, they get really excited when they are tackling problems together. And that’s most of what happens at a Contributor Day. It can make it a little difficult to see how you can join in. But never fear; the crew at the WordPress Briefing has you covered. We’ve got a couple of ways you can contribute immediately, no code required, and a handful of good next steps when you’re feeling comfortable and ready to level up.
For total beginners, so you’ve got a WordPress site, or you know, you’re about to launch one. And you’re here to learn and meet people and hopefully find someone who answers the questions you feel too shy to mention in public.
So these two ways of contribution are for you. First, you can contribute photos. WordPress has a photo directory for openly licensed photos, which are included in Openverse searches. Users can submit photographs to be used by folks all over the world. There are some basic guidelines, such as no faces or identifying characteristics. It can’t be overly edited or processed, but even photos taken on a smartphone are accepted. Because we understand that the best camera is the one you have on you.
[00:02:30] Josepha: You can also contribute translations. If you speak a language other than English, you can visit translate.WordPress.org and help translate not only the WordPress software but also plugins, themes, and other parts of the WordPress project into your native language. Since more than half of all WordPress installations are in non-English languages, adding or improving translations is really impactful. We are actually at WordCamp Asia trialing a new self-serve translation day process. So that’s a great place to have a double impact.
[00:03:03] Josepha: So those are your two completely code-free ways that you can contribute, completely beginner friendly ways to contribute at Contributor Day coming up later this week. And then for your next steps, so say that you’ve had your site for a while, you are an absolute expert in the admin, you’ve had to answer a few tough questions for yourself, you’ve watched a lot of tutorials, and so now you’re thinking of ways you can share that knowledge.
[00:03:29] Josepha: Here are a few ways that you can exercise your new knowledge and really solidify it in your brain.
Firstly, you can contribute help. Supporting other WordPress users is a great way to give back to WordPress. This can involve answering questions, providing guidance, or even providing the right resources to users. You can check out the WordPress support forums for more information, and they actually have a dedicated support team as well that works toward making sure that WordPress users have answers to the questions they are asking. You can head over to WordPress.org/support/forums and just pick an appropriate area for you, something that you are currently an expert in, and start answering questions. Start contributing.
[00:04:10] Josepha: Second thing you can do is you can contribute patterns. So WordPress has a dedicated Patterns directory, which stores a list of Block patterns. So custom designs that were created using blocks in Gutenberg that then can be used across any WordPress site, anyone’s WordPress site. You can submit those patterns, any pattern that you built, to the directory, and then they can be used by people all around the world. Basically, like anything with WordPress, if you put it in there, it can be used by anyone all around the world.
The third thing is that you can contribute events. This is one of my favorite ways to contribute. Organizing in person events to an extent has no code requirement to it, but also it does kind of require that you have a good understanding of your local community and have a willingness to get out there and build your network.
WordPress is where it is today thanks to its excellent community and all the lovely in-person events that happen all over the world. They bring our community together, and anyone can contribute by helping to organize just a small gathering or support an in-person event.
[00:05:13] Josepha: The fourth way that you can level up your contributions is to contribute by breaking things. I know that sounds weird, but testing the software to see where it breaks is actually a really valuable contribution. It’s as easy as downloading the WordPress beta tester plugin and the test reports plugin to a WordPress installation, Preferably a testing one, not one that’s currently publicly in use. But you can test out the newest version of WordPress before the release and provide useful feedback to the development team.
And the fifth way that you can level up your contribution is to contribute learning. Not that you are learning as a contribution, but what one person can learn through a tutorial or documentation, another person has to learn through discussion and hands-on learning.
This team, the folks over at learn.WordPress.org, they are the official team and official learning platform and resource for WordPress. They host video tutorials. Yes, but also host live online workshops, courses and even provide lesson plans on different topics related to WordPress. So if you are an educator or otherwise really like to help spread knowledge around, pass around the knowledge that has been hard-earned by you, this is an excellent opportunity.
[00:06:28] Josepha: And of course, if you are brave and afraid of nothing, then you can just go to Contributor Day and move from table to table until something sounds interesting to you. You don’t have to have a plan. Your whole plan can absolutely be to wander until you are found.
[00:06:45] (Music interlude)
[00:06:52] Josepha: That brings us now to our small list of big things. It’s actually a very small list today. I’ve got two things on it.
[00:07:00] Josepha: The first is that a couple of weeks back, we published the results from the 2023 annual survey. So, each year, we collect some high-level data about trends and themes across this vast ecosystem of users and site builders, people who extend WordPress core, and contributors who build WordPress core to help inform decision-making and provide valuable feedback on the project status. I looked at the results from our last survey. We had a bit of an increase in the respondents, not as much as we would have liked, but still a little bit greater number than we had in the past couple of years. And I have a lot of questions myself about what we are doing compared to what we are being asked to do and so go take a look at the blog post that has some highlights from it. It’s got a couple of contextual pieces of information in there as well, and come with your questions to WordCamps around the world or ask them in community meetings as you find them.
[00:07:58] Josepha: And then the second thing is actually that we have kind of a pilot program going on. There’s a proposal out right now about GatherPress. It’s a group of community leaders that have built a tool, a community plugin, to help gather WordPress events a bit better and a bit more “open source-ely”. It’s open currently to anyone who is running a WordPress meetup group that is interested in learning more about how a WordPress-first and open source first community gathering tool might look.
[00:08:32] Josepha: I’ll have a link to the proposal in the show notes that’ll give you more detailed information and give you an opportunity to figure out how you can join that pilot and help us figure out whether it will work or not ultimately for WordPress.
And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser or fellow brand new WordCamper. But if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at wpbriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy.
[00:09:13] Josepha: Thanks again for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
In the last few weeks, our team here at WordPress.com has rebuilt developer.wordpress.com from the ground up. If you build or design websites for other people, in any capacity, bookmark this site. It’s your new home for docs, resources, the latest news about developer features, and more.
Rather than creating a unique, custom theme, we went all-in on using Twenty Twenty-Four, which is the default theme for all WordPress sites.
That’s right, with a combination of built-in Site Editor functionalities and traditional PHP templates, we were able to create a site from scratch to house all of our developer resources.
Below, I outline exactly how our team did it.
A Twenty Twenty-Four Child Theme
The developer.wordpress.com site has existed for years, but we realized that it needed an overhaul in order to modernize the look and feel of the site with our current branding, as well as accommodate our new developer documentation.
You’ll probably agree that the site needed a refresh; here’s what developer.wordpress.com looked like two weeks ago:
Once we decided to redesign and rebuild the site, we had two options: 1) build it entirely from scratch or 2) use an existing theme.
We knew we wanted to use Full Site Editing (FSE) because it would allow us to easily use existing patterns and give our content team the best writing and editing experience without them having to commit code.
We considered starting from scratch and using the official “Create Block Theme” plugin. Building a new theme from scratch is a great option if you need something tailored to your specific needs, but Twenty Twenty-Four was already close to what we wanted, and it would give us a headstart because we can inherit most styles, templates, and code from the parent theme.
We quickly decided on a hybrid theme approach: we would use FSE as much as possible but still fall back to CSS and classic PHP templates where needed (like for our Docs custom post type).
With this in mind, we created a minimal child theme based on Twenty Twenty-Four.
Spin up a scaffold with @wordpress/create-block
We initialized our new theme by running npx @wordpress/create-block@latest wpcom-developer.
This gave us a folder with example code, build scripts, and a plugin that would load a custom block.
If you only need a custom block (not a theme), you’re all set.
But we’re building a theme here! Let’s work on that next.
Modify the setup into a child theme
First, we deleted wpcom-developer.php, the file responsible for loading our block via a plugin. We also added a functions.php file and a style.css file with the expected syntax required to identify this as a child theme.
Despite being a CSS file, we’re not adding any styles to the style.css file. Instead, you can think of it like a documentation file where Template: twentytwentyfour specifies that the new theme we’re creating is a child theme of Twenty Twenty-Four.
We removed all of the demo files in the “src” folder and added two folders inside: one for CSS and one for JS, each containing an empty file that will be the entry point for building our code.
The theme folder structure now looked like this:
The build scripts in @wordpress/create-block can build SCSS/CSS and TS/JS out of the box. It uses Webpack behind the scenes and provides a standard configuration. We can extend the default configuration further with custom entry points and plugins by adding our own webpack.config.js file.
By doing this, we can:
Build specific output files for certain sections of the site. In our case, we have both PHP templates and FSE templates from both custom code and our parent Twenty Twenty-Four theme. The FSE templates need minimal (if any) custom styling (thanks to theme.json), but our developer documentation area of the site uses a custom post type and page templates that require CSS.
Remove empty JS files after building the *.asset.php files. Without this, an empty JS file will be generated for each CSS file.
Our webpack.config.js ended up looking similar to the code below. Notice that we’re simply extending the defaultConfig with a few extra properties.
Any additional entry points, in our case src/docs, can be added as a separate entry in the entry object.
// WordPress webpack config.
const defaultConfig = require( '@wordpress/scripts/config/webpack.config' );
// Plugins.
const RemoveEmptyScriptsPlugin = require( 'webpack-remove-empty-scripts' );
// Utilities.
const path = require( 'path' );
// Add any new entry points by extending the webpack config.
module.exports = {
...defaultConfig,
...{
entry: {
'css/global': path.resolve( process.cwd(), 'src/css', 'global.scss' ),
'js/index': path.resolve( process.cwd(), 'src/js', 'index.js' ),
},
plugins: [
// Include WP's plugin config.
...defaultConfig.plugins,
// Removes the empty `.js` files generated by webpack but
// sets it after WP has generated its `*.asset.php` file.
new RemoveEmptyScriptsPlugin( {
stage: RemoveEmptyScriptsPlugin.STAGE_AFTER_PROCESS_PLUGINS
} )
]
}
};
In functions.php, we enqueue our built assets and files depending on specific conditions. For example, we built separate CSS files for the docs area of the site, and we only enqueued those CSS files for our docs.
We didn’t need to register the style files from Twenty Twenty-Four, as WordPress handles these inline.
We did need to enqueue the styles for our classic, non-FSE templates (in the case of our developer docs) or any additional styles we wanted to add on top of the FSE styles.
To build the production JS and CSS locally, we run npm run build.
For local development, you can run npm run start in one terminal window and npx wp-env start (using the wp-env package) in another to start a local WordPress development server running your theme.
While building this site, our team of designers, developers, and content writers used a WordPress.com staging site so that changes did not affect the existing developer.wordpress.com site until we were ready to launch this new theme.
theme.json
Twenty Twenty-Four has a comprehensive theme.json file that defines its styles. By default, our hybrid theme inherits all of the style definitions from the parent (Twenty Twenty-Four) theme.json file.
We selectively overwrote the parts we wanted to change (the color palette, fonts, and other brand elements), leaving the rest to be loaded from the parent theme.
WordPress handles this merging, as well as any changes you make in the editor.
Many of the default styles worked well for us, and we ended up with a compact theme.json file that defines colors, fonts, and gradients. Having a copy of the parent theme’stheme.json file makes it easier to see how colors are referenced.
Why might you want to export your editor changes? Styles can then be transferred back to code to ensure they match and make it easier to distribute your theme or move it from a local development site to a live site. This ensures the FSE page templates are kept in code with version control.
When we launched this new theme on production, the template files loaded from our theme directory; we didn’t need to import database records containing the template syntax or global styles.
Global styles in SCSS/CSS
Global styles are added as CSS variables, and they can be referenced in CSS. Changing the value in theme.json will also ensure that the other colors are updated.
For example, here’s how we reference our “contrast” color as a border color:
border-color: var(--wp--preset--color--contrast);
What about header.php and footer.php?
Some plugins require these files in a theme, e.g. by calling get_header(), which does not automatically load the FSE header template.
We did not want to recreate our header and footer to cover those cases; having just one source of truth is a lot better.
By using do_blocks(), we were able to render our needed header block. Here’s an example from a header template file:
Check out our new-and-improved developer.wordpress.com site today, and leave a comment below telling us what you think. We’d love your feedback.
Using custom code and staging sites are just two of the many developer features available to WordPress.com sites that we used to build our new and improved developer.wordpress.com.
If you’re a developer and interested in getting early access to other development-related features, click here to enable our “I am a developer” setting on your WordPress.com account.
There are currently very few options for individual users to control how their content is used for AI training, and we want to change that. That’s why we’re launching a new tool that lets you opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use such content for training models.
The reality is that AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes and in all sorts of ways. We will engage with AI companies that we can have productive relationships with, and are working to give you an easy way to control access to your content.
We’re also getting ahead of proposed regulations around the world. The European Union’s AI Act, for example, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by the emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing an opt-out toggle and working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.
To opt out, visit the privacy settings for each of your sites and toggle on the “Prevent third-party data sharing” option.
Please note: If you’ve already chosen in your settings to discourage search engines from crawling your site, we’ve automatically applied that privacy preference to third-party data sharing.
We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from WordPress.com and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. We want to represent all of you on WordPress.com and make sure that there are protections in place for how your content is used. As part of that, we have added a setting to opt out of sharing your public site content with third parties. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.
WordPress 6.5 Beta 3 is here and ready for testing!
This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 3 on a test server and site.
You can test WordPress 6.5 Beta 3 in four ways:
Plugin
Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).
The current target date for the final release of WordPress 6.5 is March 26, 2024. That’s only four weeks away! Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.
Your help testing the WordPress 6.5 Beta 3 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
WordPress 6.5 Beta 3 contains more than 45 updates to the Editor since the Beta 2 release, including more than 35 tickets for WordPress Core.
Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 2 using these links:
Halfway through a relaxing winter break with my family, I opened Slack for a quick dopamine hit. The message I saw waiting from Matt, Automattic’s CEO, was quite the surprise:
“Would you be interested in running WordPress.com while I’m on sabbatical?”
In honesty, my initial reaction was “No, not really.” It seemed like a lot of work, stressful, etc. But, I named my last team YOLO for a reason: the answer is always “Yes,” because you only live once.
Many teams at Automattic use the “red / yellow / green check-in” as a communication tool. At nearly the one-month mark of running WordPress.com, I can safely say I’ve experienced the entire rainbow of emotional states. Today, I’d like to share a few of my learnings with the hope that they help you during your leadership journey.
Also, one pro tip: don’t open Slack on vacation.
Problem #1: I’m receiving 50x more pings
My former team is largely based in Europe, so their day started much earlier than mine. When I signed on for the morning, I’d usually have a few things to respond to before I dived into work.
These days, I drink from the firehose. I wake up to dozens of P2 mentions, Slack DMs, and other communication threads. I clear them out, and then they just pile up again.
Solution: Delegate, delegate, delegate
Ideally, I’d like to run the business while skiing fresh powder. In order to do so, I need a great team whom I can trust to get the job done.
For our recent efforts, the WordPress.com leadership team traveled a collective 160 hours to meet in NYC. While there, we focused on identifying goals that answered the question: “If we did this in the next 90 days, would it be transformative to the business?” Everyone went home with a specific set of goals they own. Knowing what we’re trying to do and who is responsible for what are two key elements of delegation.
Additionally, I also encourage the team on a daily basis to:
Actively work together before they come to me. On a soccer field, the team would get nowhere if they had to ask the coach before every pass.
Come to me with “I intend to,” not “What should I do?” Actively acting on their own and reporting progress represents the highest level of initiative.
Ultimately, I should be the critical point of failure on very few things. When something comes up, there should be an obvious place for it within the organization.
Problem: Something is always on fire
I am a very “Inbox Zero” type of person. Running WordPress.com breaks my brain in some ways because there’s always something broken. Whether it’s bugs in our code, overloaded customer support, or a marketing email misfire, entropy is a very real thing in a business this large.
Even more astounding is the game of “whac-a-mole”: when making a tiny change to X, it can be difficult to detect a change in Y or take Y down entirely. There’s always something!
Solution: Focus on the next most important thing
When dealing with the constant fires and the constant firehose, I’ve found a great deal of comfort in asking myself: “What’s the most important thing for me to work on next?”
Leadership is about results, not the hours you put in. More often than not, achieving these results comes from finding points of leverage that create outsized returns.
At the end of the day, the most I can do is put my best effort forth.
Problem: We’re moving too slowly
By default, nothing will ever get done in a large organization. There are always reasons something shouldn’t be done, additional feedback that needs to be gathered, or uncertainties someone doesn’t feel comfortable with.
If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re a large organization—congratulations! You must’ve done something well along the way. But, remember: stasis equals death. Going too slowly can be even more risky than making the wrong decision.
Solution #3: “70% confident”
I think “70% confident” has been kicking around for a while, but Jeff Bezos articulated it well in his 2016 letter to shareholders (emphasis mine):
Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
In leadership, I find “70% confident” to be a particularly effective communication tool. It explicitly calls out risk appetite, encourages a level of uncertainty, and identifies a sweet spot between not enough planning and analysis paralysis. Progress only happens with a certain degree of risk.
I’m excited to start sharing what we’ve been working on. Stay tuned for new developer tools, powerful updates to WordPress.com, and tips for making the perfect pizza dough. If you’d like some additional reading material, here is a list of my favorite leadership books.
The WordPress.com team is always working on new design ideas to bring your website to life. Check out the latest themes in our library, including great options for gamers, writers, and anyone else who creates on the web.
This magazine-style theme was built with gaming bloggers in mind, but is versatile enough to work exceptionally well for nearly any type of budding media empire. Using a classic blogging layout, we’ve combined modern WordPress technology—Blocks, Global Styles, etc.—with a nostalgic aesthetic that hearkens to the earlier days of the internet.
Whether you’re a casual observer or a diehard rain-or-shine follower, fandom means a lot of things to a lot of people. Allez is a perfect theme to chronicle that part of who you are. Built with sports-focused content in mind, the layout, styling, and patterns used all speak to that niche. That said, WordPress is versatile enough that if you like the overall feel of Allez, it can easily be customized to your particular endeavor.
Strand is a simple newsletter and blogging theme with a split layout, similar to Poesis. We placed the newsletter subscription form in the sticky left column, so that it’s always visible and accessible. It’s a simple design, but one we really like for the minimalist writer who puts more emphasis on words than visual panache.
Inspired by the iconic worlds of Minecraft and Minetest (an open-source game engine), this blogging theme was designed to replicate the immersive experience of these games. While encapsulating the essence of virtual realms, we also wanted to ensure that the theme resonated with the Minecraft aesthetic regardless of the content it hosts.
At the heart of Bedrock is a nostalgic nod to the classic blog layout, infused with a distinctive “mosaic” texture. The sidebar sits confidently on every page and houses a few old-school elements like a tag cloud, a blogroll, and recent posts, all rendered with a touch of the game’s charm. If this theme speaks to you, give it a shot today.
Nook is another blogging theme that offers a delightful canvas for your DIY projects, delicious recipes, and creative inspirations. It’s also easily extensible to add paid products or courses. Our aim here was to create an elegant and timeless look with a sense of warmth and familiarity. The typography and color palette feature high-contrast elements that evoke coziness and comfort.
To install any of the above themes, click the name of the theme you like, which brings you right to the installation page. Then click the “Activate this design” button. You can also click “Open live demo,” which brings up a clickable, scrollable version of the theme for you to preview.
Premium themes are available to use at no extra charge for customers on the Explorer plan or above. Partner themes are third-party products that can be purchased for $79/year each.
You can explore all of our themes by navigating to the “Themes” page, which is found under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard. Or you can click below:
The WordPress project team is continuously improving the Site Editor—your one-stop shop for editing and designing your site.
The latest batch of updates—Gutenberg 17.4 and 17.5—include a handful of small but powerful changes designed to improve both your WordPress experience and that of your site’s visitors.
Let’s take a look at what’s new.
More robust style revisions
Image credit: WordPress.org
When you’re in the zone making changes to the look and feel of your site, you sometimes hit a dead end or realize that the version you had three or four font and color tweaks ago was a bit better. The updated style revisions pane gives you a robust, detailed log of the design changes you’ve made and makes turning back the clock easier with a one-click restore option to take you back to that perfect design.
Newly added pagination and more granular details make this feature even more powerful.
You can access style revisions from the Site Editor by clicking the “Styles” icon on the top right of the page, and then clicking the “Revisions” clock icon.
Unified preferences panel
Image credit: WordPress.org
It’s now much easier to manage your site and post-editing preferences, which have been combined and enhanced in the latest update. In addition to familiar settings, you’ll find new appearance and accessibility options, and an “allow right click” toggle which allows you to override stubborn browser defaults. You can access your preferences by heading to the three-dot menu at the top right of the editor and clicking “Preferences” at the bottom.
Randomized gallery images
Video credit: WordPress.org
The Gallery Block’s always been a great way to show off a collection of photos or images. And now there’s a fun new setting to randomize the order in which those images appear every time the page or post is loaded by a new visitor.
You can turn this setting on with a toggle found at the bottom of the block settings pane:
Streamlined edits in List View
Image credit: WordPress.org
Not everybody knows about the Site Editor’s List View, but it can make editing your site, posts, and pages significantly faster and easier. A new addition to the List View makes editing even more convenient: just right-click any item in the list to open up the settings menu for the selected block.
Even small changes can make a big difference to your workflow, and your site visitor’s overall experience.
We’d love to hear what you think about the new features when you’ve had a chance to take them for a test drive!
This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 2 on a test server and site.
You can test WordPress 6.5 Beta 2 in four ways:
Plugin
Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).
Your help testing the WordPress 6.5 Beta 2 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
WordPress 6.5 Beta 2 contains more than 50 updates to the Editor since the Beta 1 release, including 40+ tickets for WordPress core.
Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 1 using these links:
