WordPress 6.6 is just days away, and it’s always an exciting time for developers when a new major release ships. There are lots of new features to tinker with and handy updates to make extending and using WordPress just a little nicer.
Officially, version 6.6 is expected to ship on July 16, 2024 (read the development cycle timeline for more information).
If you haven’t already done so, now is a great time to test your plugins and themes against the latest changes. WordPress 6.6 RC 3 is the most up-to-date version to check out.
Also, be sure to read the Field Guide, which covers all the major changes you should know about. It has links to all the Developer Notes and a breakdown of what happened during the development cycle.
As usual, this post will contain a list of development-related changes in the past month. Be sure to test them while using WordPress and Gutenberg trunk. Some of the features and changes listed below, unless otherwise noted, are under development and won’t be released until WordPress 6.7.
Table of Contents
Highlights
Section style and block style variation updates
“Section styles” and other updates to the block style variation feature represent a huge shift in what’s possible for themes, giving you more control using the standard design tools. Be sure to check out the dev note for an overview of what this update offers.
Since the initial release of this feature in Gutenberg, several updates have landed in time for WordPress 6.6:
- You can now define a
slug
for section style JSON files, which is used for generating the variation class. - Titles for variations defined in
theme.json
are now properly internationalized. - The
css
property is supported for block style variations, letting you add custom CSS if needed. - Duplicate block style variation CSS is no longer output.
New course: Beginner WordPress Developer
The WordPress Training Team released a new course titled Beginner WordPress Developer. It walks you through what you need to know to start your journey into building everything from themes to plugins to blocks.
The course provides an extensive overview of the basics of almost every development topic relevant to WordPress. While it is geared toward first-time developers, there’s enough information available that it’s worthwhile for veterans in the community to learn something new.
WordPress 6.6 Media Corps Briefing
The first WordPress Media Corps Briefing was held on June 27, 2024. The goal of these briefings is to provide media outlets with information around the release. While the session is not specifically geared toward developers, there is still a lot of useful information for anyone who builds on top of WordPress.
Plugins and tools
WordPress 6.6 developer notes
There are several dev notes for WordPress 6.6 that cover new features, updated APIs, and progress on experimental features:
- Data Views Update – June 2024
- Editor: Unified Extensibility APIs in 6.6
- Grid layout type
- Updates to the Interactivity API in 6.6
- Editing custom fields from connected blocks
- Updates to the HTML API in 6.6
- Introducing the Token Map
- JSX in WordPress 6.6
- Options API: Disabling autoload for large options
- Preparation for React 19 Upgrade
- Dropping support for PHP 7.0 and 7.1
- Miscellaneous developer changes in WordPress 6.6
- Miscellaneous Editor changes in WordPress 6.6
Custom post type actions with Data Views
A new API in Gutenberg 18.6 lets you register and unregister post type actions when building custom Data Views. Currently, these actions appear in two places in the UI:
- Site Editor views
- Sidebar in the Post or Site Editor
The API is currently a part of the Editor package but will likely be moved to a dedicated package in the future.
JSON Schema for .wp-env.json
.wp-env.json
files now have JSON Schema support, which you can define via the standard $schema
property. This should make it easier to validate your JSON code in your preferred code editor.
Block Bindings API bug fixes
Several important bug fixes landed for the Block Bindings API:
- Reverted a change that caused values beginning with a number to break.
- Applied a fix for the Site Editor breaking when selecting bound and unbound blocks.
- Corrected an issue where Button blocks with empty content would not work within bindings.
Themes
WordPress 6.6 developer notes
That latest WordPress release will include many theme-heavy features and enhancements. Be sure to read through the dev notes to catch up before 6.6 goes live:
- Theme.json version 3 (Make Core)
- Theme.json version 3 frequently asked questions (Make Themes FAQs)
- WordPress 6.6 CSS Specificity
- Site-wide background images in WordPress 6.6
- Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 6.6 edition)
- Miscellaneous Editor changes in WordPress 6.6
- Grid layout type
- Editor: Unified Extensibility APIs in 6.6
- Improvements to active block variation detection
This cannot be stressed enough: the theme.json
version 3 update and changes to CSS specificity will almost assuredly mean updating some of your code. At the very least, you should read those posts and test your themes.
On the whole, the updates open up a lot of the other nice features in the 6.6 release, but the reality is that they may cause some small compatibility issues with previous code.
Color and typography variation changes
Color and typography variations are two of the biggest theming features coming to WordPress 6.6. However, an issue arose with how the underlying code generated options in the UI for the end user. Previously, any type of style variation with either registered colors or typography would generate an option. This proved to be problematic with some designs.
Therefore, the feature was changed to generate options in the UI for color-only or typography-only style variations. This update will provide theme authors more control over what color and typography choices the user sees.
Additionally, a change in Gutenberg 18.7 shows a tooltip with the color or typography variation name when hovering over the option. This change will not be in WordPress 6.6, though.
Block library design and setting enhancements
Gutenberg 18.6 and 18.7 added several supported design tools to various blocks, giving you more freedom in your theme designs:
- Post Content now supports background images and padding.
- The Quote, Pullquote, and Verse blocks support background images and a minimum height.
- Both the Post Date and Comment Dates now let you set a relative date format (e.g., 00 hours ago).
- Writing mode support was added to the Button, Verse, Site Title, and Site Tagline blocks.
Experimental grid layout
A new Grid variation for the Group block will land in WordPress 6.6, but overall grid layout support is far from finalized. Contributors continue working on making the feature more powerful. In Gutenberg 18.7, you can drag and drop nested grid items across multiple columns and rows. You can test this by enabling Grid interactivity from the Gutenberg > Experiments screen in your WordPress admin (or use this Playground instance to start testing).
Check out the Hallway Hangout on Exploring Grid Layouts for a deeper dive into what’s possible in WordPress 6.6 and what’s coming in future versions.
Classic themes
In WordPress 6.6, classic themes can opt into the default font and spacing sizes using the standard add_theme_support()
function:
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'themeslug_setup' );
function themeslug_setup() {
add_theme_support( 'default-font-sizes' );
add_theme_support( 'default-spacing-sizes' );
}
Notable bug fixes
Several bug fixes landed in Gutenberg 18.6 and 18.7 that will be included in the WordPress 6.6 release. Most of these are CSS fixes for things introduced during the 6.6 development cycle and were found during beta:
- The
.editor-styles-wrapper
class is now wrapped in:where()
so that the Core CSS styles reset works. - Letter spacing is inherited by nested items when set on the Navigation block.
- The
.wp-element-caption
class is no longer applied to the Blockquote block’s<cite>
element in the Editor. - In flow layouts, global padding is added to children of full-width blocks.
- The default CSS specificity was lowered for caption styles to allow
theme.json
to override them. - The UI order for
theme.json
spacing sizes order was corrected so that it works with both non-numeric slugs and those that begin with a number.
Resources
Developer Hours
Three educational sessions for developers happened in the last several weeks, each covering new features coming in WordPress 6.6:
- Exploring Synced Pattern Overrides in WordPress 6.6
- What’s new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6
- Editor unification and extensibility in WordPress 6.6
Hallway Hangouts
Two Hallway Hangouts, which are community discussions around WordPress features, occurred over the past month:
- Recap Hallway Hangout: Theme Building with Playground, Create-block-theme plugin, and GitHub
- Recap Hallway Hangout: Exploring Grid Layouts
Developer Blog
Five new posts were published here on the Developer Blog in the last month. They cover everything from new WordPress 6.6 features to existing APIs that you can use:
- 15 ways to curate the WordPress editing experience
- An introduction to overrides in Synced Patterns
- How to create an animated timeline plugin
- An introduction to the Transients API
- Styling sections, nested elements, and more with Block Style Variations in WordPress 6.6
Props to @bph and @ndiego for feedback and review on this post.
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