Currently we have the WordPress 5.7 beta on the market and it is scheduled for release on March 9, 2021. This is the first major release of the year and brings us some new improvements and features.
Today we will present to you all new features you can expect in WordPress 5.7, along with screenshots.
Editor improvement
The WordPress editor is very important for website owners as that’s the place where they spent most of their time writing content and creating new pages.
Each new WordPress release comes with improvements to the editor as well as new features. The new version will bring us some exciting new enhancements which will improve your user experience.
Drag-and-drop blocks from Inserter
With the new version you will be able to drag-and-drop a block from the Add new block option into the content area. This will give you the chance to choose where you wish to place the block.
Full-height Blocks
Are you a fan of the full-width blocks for columns, colour, and group blocks? This will give you the chance to create stunning layouts and full-height blocks too.
Block variations with their own descriptions
WordPress 5.7 can now show descriptions for block variations. For example, the social icons block has Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. They can be viewed in the block inspector with a preview.
Social icons sizes
You can adjust the size of the icons located in the social media icons block.
Improvement in buttons
You now have the option for vertical alignment for different buttons in the block editor. Users can now choose from a preset percentage width for the buttons.
Adjusting font size in more blocks
Another big improvement is the ability to change the font size in the more blogs which includes the code and list blocks.
Migration from HTTP to HTTPS
When you used to move WordPress from HTTP to HTTPS in the past, you had to manually update URLs which were embedded in the content. If you did not do it the result was mix content issue.
The new version of WordPress makes it easier to migrate your website to HTTPS. It can show your availability of the HTTPS from the site health menu.
From there, users can click a button to update WordPress URLs. This will change the settings of WP and Site URLs, as well as update the URLs in the content in order to use HTTPs.
WP-Admin Color Palette
WordPress 5.7 will now standardize the wp-admin colour palette. WP has a very limited set of colour schemes that will now introduce new ones, which was quite difficult for developers as they had to deal with Sass variable-based system.
With the new release, WordPress is going to collapse all colours which were used in the CSS to one of the available shades of green, blue, yellow, red, grey, white, and black. This provides a wider range of light and dark colour schemes.
New Robots API
WordPress 5.7 present a new robots API. It will allow developers to have control and update the robot meta tag on a specific website.
The robot meta tag helps you to tell search engine bolts that they need to crawl and index your website. You can achieve this by adding a robot.txt file to your website’s root folder or with the help of the robots meta tag.
The new function which is presented wp_robots, will be able to modify the robots meta tag by simply adding their own filters to the function. It could look something like this:
WordPress is going to add a mix-image-preview:large directive to the robots meta tag by default. This will help search engines to use the large image for showing previews in search results.
WP can automatically hide this tag for websites which have search engine visibility turned off from their settings.
If you wish to let search engines choose which image they would like to use for the previews, simply add this code to the themes functions.php file.
Lazy loading iFrames
WordPress will add a lazy load to iframe embed automatically. This is a technique which improves your website speed during page loading.
WordPress is already using lazy loading since WordPress 5.5.
This means that for all embeds using iframes, for example YouTube, they will use lazy loading in order to improve the page load speed.
There will be also a lot of changes for developers which they can explore and use in their own plugins, themes, and projects.
WordPress 5.7 will introduce new functions is_post_publicly_viewable() and is_post_status_viewable() which can help you check if a post is publicly viewable.
Developers will be able to filter content for a single block with the help of render block functions.
A new filter hook will be added to edit $user_data variable during the retrieve_password () function. This way, developers can perform custom validation checks.
Developers will have to option to amend the Go to site link, located in the login page footer with the help of the new login_site_html_link hook.
We hope today’s article was useful in giving you an idea of what to expect with the new WordPress 5.7.
