WordPress 5.7 – What’s New Coming with Screenshots
The final release of WordPress 5.7 is just around the corner! After the release of WordPress 5.6 “Simone” in December last year, WordPress 5.7 will be the first major release of the year 2021 and the first step towards enabling Full Site Editing via Gutenberg editor. It’s also the first of four releases planned for this year.
If you’re not familiar with new features and improvements coming to version 5.7 yet, now is a perfect time. Here’s a quick rundown of what WordPress 5.7 will bring to end-users and developers.
HIGHLIGHTS
Improvements to the Editor – For End-Users
The WordPress editor is a place where users spend much of their time writing content and creating pages. As always, the new release of WordPress brings several new features and enhancements to the Gutenberg block editor to enhance your editing experience. Here are some of the most notable ones:
#Drag & Drop Blocks from Inserter
Starting WordPress 5.7, you’ll be able to drag blocks from the ‘Add new block’ (+) inserter and drop them anywhere into your posts and pages. Thus you can cut down the time spent creating a page or post.
#Full-screen Blocks
Blocks, like the group, cover, and columns, now have an option to fill the entire viewport. This lets you create visually stunning, full-height layouts using cool hero images with just a few clicks of the mouse. Previously you could do this only by either building your own block or adding extra CSS.
#Descriptions for Block Variations
The upcoming version of WordPress will show descriptions beneath block variations. They can be viewed in the block inspector with a preview. Additionally, a new dropdown in the block inspector allows you to switch between block variations.
#Ability to Adjust Social Icon Sizes
WordPress 5.7 lets you adjust icons’ sizes in the Social Icons block!
#Improved Buttons
In WordPress 5.7, the Buttons block will support vertical alignments. You’ll be able to set the width of a button to a preset percentage.
#Ability to Adjust Font Size in More Blocks
You can now also change the font size in more blocks, like the Code and List blocks.
#Reusable Blocks
Several updates have been made to reusable blocks to improve usability and stability. Reusable blocks are now saved simultaneously when the post is saved.
Improvements to the Core – For Developers
WordPress 5.7 will also bring several notable fixes and improvements to make developers’ lives easier and more convenient. These include:
#Streamlined HTTP to HTTPS Migration
WordPress 5.7 makes it easier for everyone to migrate a site from HTTP to HTTPS. After you update your site to version 5.7, you’ll no longer need to install any plugin to handle the transition from HTTP to HTTPS. The process now happens in one click!
Now, if your site has an SSL certificate, you’ll see a button saying ‘Update your site to use HTTPS’ in your Site Health report. Once you click that button, all the URLs in the database will be automatically updated to HTTPS.
It’s a small enhancement but will prove quite useful!
#Standardized Dashboard Color Palette
WordPress comes with a limited set of Admin color schemes. Since it uses a Sass variable-based system to generate CSS files, introducing new color schemes has become a challenge for developers.
For solving this issue, version 5.7 will standardize the Admin color palette. It will collapse all colors used in WP-Admin CSS to a single palette of the available shades, like black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, and grey. This will provide developers a palette with a broader spectrum of dark and light color schemes, according to current accessibility guidelines.
#New Robots API
WordPress 5.7 will bring a new Robots API, using which developers can control and update the robots meta tag for each post and page on their website through code.
The upcoming version of WordPress will introduce a new function called wp_robots. Developers can add their own filters to the function to change the robots meta tag. Here is an example in action:
function wporg_wp_robots_add_follow( $robots ) {
$robots[‘follow’] = true;
return $robots;
}
add_filter( ‘wp_robots’, ‘wporg_wp_robots_add_follow’ );
By default, the new version of WordPress will also add a max-image-preview:large directive to the tag. This will help search engines display large image previews in search engine result pages.
<meta name=”robots” content=”max-image-preview:large, follow” />
And the best thing? This tag will be automatically hidden for websites that have search engine indexing disabled in the settings.
#Lazy Loading iFrames
Since the release of WordPress 5.5, the CMS implements a lazy loading technique for all images by default, and now iframe embeds are going to get the same treatment in WordPress 5.7. This means all embeds that use iframes, such as podcast players, Vimeo, and YouTube videos, will leverage lazy loading to speed up your WordPress site. This improvement will prove extremely beneficial to you if you run a WordPress site with many videos.
That’s all about WordPress 5.7! If you face any issues while upgrading to the latest version of the CMS, feel free to get in touch with our WordPress experts right away.
