Today marks the release of WordPress 5.8 the next major release of WordPress with some big new features. This release is largely based around the next phase of the Gutenberg project which aims to reimagine the default WordPress editor over the next few years.
Today’s release takes a step forward on the promise of full site editing within Gutenberg bring some new blocks for displaying blog posts, more design tools for blocks and a new responsive navigation block that will allow you to start building and customising site headers with the block editor. Beyond the new responsive navigation block, there are also some key new blocks for creating templates within the editor including:
- Site Logo
- Site Tagline
- Site Title
- Query Loop
- Post Title
- Post Content
- Post Date
- Post Excerpt
- Post Featured Image
- Post Categories
- Post Tags
- Login/out
- Page List
There is also a new widget experience that allows you to use blocks from Gutenberg as widgets around your site. New pattern tools, improved handles in the block editor to make resizing easier and intelligent pattern suggestions allowing you to quickly build complex pages. In addition, web developers also get access to a ton of new APIs to support all of this functionality.
We are also getting native WebP image support giving WordPress access to better page speed scores with the use of next-generation image formats that offer better compression compared to the old Jpeg and PNG file types. However, one downside is that it will not automatically replace the image with JPEG or PNG if a user is on an unsupported browser. By using the WebP image format, your images will be 25-34% smaller in file size than PNG and JPEG without losing quality.
Finally, this version of WordPress officially drops support for Internet Explorer 11 the last version of the dated browser WordPress supported. This marks a big step forward as WordPress no longer needs to carry any baggage for legacy browsers we will start to see new features and a faster WordPress core in the future.
Like most WordPress releases of late, these new features all require support from your theme to work and a lot of them won’t even show in the WordPress admin without a compatible theme so you likely won’t see any difference in your site or editor tools after the upgrade.
