WordPress 6.0, code named ‘Arturo’ is rolling out with nearly a thousand improvements and new features.

You will get an improved list view experience, style theme variations, additional templates, new blocks, new enhancements to the block editors, and many more. As there are many new things coming in this release, we will go over some of the features and improvements that will likely have an impact on the way you use WordPress.

Table of Content

• Full site editing & new features
  • Style variations and global style switcher
  • Theme export capability
  • New templates
  • List view enhancements
• Block editor enhancements
  • New core blocks
  • More features and enhancements
• Writing Enhancements
• Design & layout tools
• Conclusion

Full site editing & new features

Full site editing was the talk of the town when this major feature was introduced in previous releases. WordPress 6.0 continues to build upon the groundwork laid in 5.9 and further improves on what you can do with full site editing. You will need to use a block-based theme such as WordPress’s Twenty-Twenty-Two to take advantage of full site editing.

Style variations and global style switcher

Many people in the WordPress community are excited about this feature in the Site Editor. You’ll have the option to utilize subject varieties got from one single topic utilizing different variety and text style blends. It’s similar to having a few child themes yet incorporated into one single subject. And it’s incredibly easy to apply a new style variation across your entire site. From now on, you’ll be able to change the look and feel of your website with just a click.

Theme export capability

There is a huge improvement to full site editing. The WordPress platform as a whole has the ability to export block themes. Any templates, layouts, and style changes you made can be saved and exported to a .zip file.

This feature is very big because it will curve the way for visual theme building. You can easily create a WordPress theme just by using Gutenberg blocks. And of course, no coding knowledge is required!

To export your theme, navigate to your Site editor and click on the 3 dots icon in your top right corner. You should find a menu with the option to download your theme.

New templates

You are being able to use and customize templates to create your website is great because it helps you to save time. As you know we had templates to work with in previous WordPress versions, but the options were very few. WordPress 6.0 builds on this and has introduced several new templates for specific functions.

These include templates for displaying posts from a specific author, category, date, tag, or taxonomy.

List view enhancements

When you see the list view in WordPress 6.0, you will find that your blocks are grouped together and collapsed instead of showing everything like in previous versions. This will make navigating the list view much easier.

Moreover, when you’re working on a page with the list view open and you click anywhere on the page, it will give you options precisely where you are in the list view. Anyone who regularly works on complex pages should appreciate this enhancement.

Block editor enhancements

New core blocks

WordPress Arturo will sync with several new blocks including post author biography, avatar, no result in query loop, and read more.

We want to show you to the new comment query loop block because it further blocks the comment section of your post. With this new block, you’ll get plenty of customization options to design the comment section the way you want to.

More features and enhancements

There are quite a lot of improvements and enhancements to the block editor. We will mention a few that we think will be the most beneficial for you.

One of the new enhancements in the block editor is block locking. Moving forward, you’ll be able to lock a block so it can’t be moved and/or edited. A locked block will show a padlock when you click on it.

Furthermore, when you open the list view, you’ll also see the padlock indicating a locked block. This feature is especially useful if you work a lot with reusable blocks. It’s also helpful for preserving design layouts when you’re creating templates or working with clients.

Another cool feature in this new version is style retention. It’s now possible to keep a block’s style when transforming certain blocks from one type to another and vice versa. It works with quite a few blocks, ranging from quote, list, code, heading, pull-quote, verse, etcetera.

The cover block can now dynamically grab your featured image and set it as the background for the cover block. All you have to do is select the ‘use featured image‘ setting and WordPress will do the rest.

Writing Enhancements

From WordPress 6.0 onwards, you can easily select text across blocks and edit it to your liking. This is definitely a quality of life improvement.

Also coming your way is a new link completer shortcut. You can access this shortcut anytime by typing “[[” and it will show you a list of links on your site.

Lastly, WordPress will remind you to add tags and categories as the last step before you can publish a post. When you publish a lot of posts, it can be easy to forget this step so this is quite a neat feature for forgetful folks.

Design & layout tools

The first one is transparency control for background, which is very useful when you want to use a background with columns. You’ll surely elevate your post design if you can make use of this feature. The next fun addition to WordPress 6.0 is gap support for the gallery block. This just means you have more control over the spacing of your images, giving you a bit more freedom on how you want to display your image gallery.

Conclusion

WordPress 6.0 comes with several important changes for developers. Following are a few of the developer changes.

• Webfonts API will provide theme authors with a more efficient way to manage local fonts via PHP or theme.json.
• An API to prevent blocks from appearing on the Widgets screen.
• Make get_the_author_link pluggable. (#51859)
• Improved sticky post query. (#36907)
• New filter edit_custom_thumbnail_sizes to work with individual image sizes. (#28277)

We hope this article helped you discover what’s new in WordPress 6.0 and which new features to try out. We are particularly excited about patterns for pages and the full site editing experience.