WordPress 6.6 is here – WordPress.com News

A few times a year, the open source software WordPress receives a major update, providing users with new features, regular improve­ments, and important bug fixes. With hundreds of fixes and improve­ments, WordPress 6.6 brings a new level of creativity, usability and efficiency to your WordPressing.

Here’s a quick overview of what this latest update brings to the people of WordPress.com, starting with some basics about WordPress 6.6.

Table of contents

1. The basics
2. More efficient views and navigation in the site editor
3. Consistent and updated publishing flow
4. Override synced patterns with custom content
5. Automatic plugin rollbacks
6. New design elements
   1. Website background image
   2. Negative margins
   3. Completely new network support
   4. Custom default shadow styles
7. Section specific styles
8. Block binding API upgrades
9. And more!

The basics

WordPress 6.6 is available now and has probably already landed on your WordPress.com site. You may notice that many of these new features have already been available on your sites for a few weeks or even months. We often roll out updates in waves on WordPress.com to allow for early access, testing, and iteration before these major updates are released more broadly.

Websites on WordPress.com are updated automat­i­cally. If you encounter any problems or errors, you can always contact our experi­enced Happiness Engineers at wordpress.com/help.

More efficient views and navigation in the site editor

The last few major WordPress releases have dramat­i­cally changed the site editor experience. With 6.6, you’ll see a new default side-by-side layout when viewing and editing pages.

Pattern management has also been better integrated, ensuring more efficient navigation and fewer clicks to get where you want to be.

These major changes include a number of small improve­ments to keyboard navigation, bulk edit actions, and the overall design and function­ality of the site editor.

Consistent and updated publishing flow

If you’ve ever dabbled with the site editor, you’ve noticed that it used to provide a very different experience than the page/post editor. WordPress 6.6 now offers a common publishing workflow, resulting in smoother inter­ac­tions when navigating between different elements of your site.

As part of this unifi­cation, there is also an update to the layout and design of the publishing flow with more prominent indicators for title, publishing status and featured image.

For all the plugin and theme devel­opers out there, this special update also makes it easier to expand the editor. Both the post/page editor and site editor now use the same slots and exten­si­bility APIs.

For users, this means that many more plugins can bring exciting features to the editor. For plugin devel­opers, this means it’s easier to implement your code to extend the editor’s capabil­ities.

Override synced patterns with custom content

This new feature allows you to edit specific blocks even when using synchro­nized patterns and styles. For example, if you have a pattern for a stylized button CTA, you can use this override feature to use different copy or even colors for different pages and button locations while maintaining common elements.

You can enable overrides in the Advanced section of the Paragraph, Heading, Buttons, and Image blocks. Further block support is planned for the future.

Automatic plugin rollbacks

When it comes to plugin management, WordPress.com offers unpar­al­leled relia­bility and redun­dancy. In addition to the planned plugin updates we recently rolled out, WordPress Core now offers automatic rollbacks if a plugin update fails.

If you don’t use scheduled updates, your plugins will be automat­i­cally updated as new versions become available.

In the past, when a plugin update failed, WordPress would leave the plugin inactive, which could result in some parts of your website becoming unusable or broken. In WordPress 6.6, the plugin will revert to the previous version to ensure conti­nuity with your website until you can diagnose and fix the problem.

New design elements

WordPress 6.6 offers a handful of new customization options for designing and stylizing your website. Let’s explore the most impactful new features.

Website background image

Create instant visual impact with the new site-wide background image option in the site editor. Whether it’s a bold, solid photo or a whimsical graphic pattern, you have the freedom to choose size, position and repetition.

Negative margins

You can now set negative margins for each block, allowing for more granular margin control. This allows users to create overlapping design elements more easily. Note that negative values ​​must be entered manually and not using the slider.

Completely new network support

Use the Grid and Grid Layout blocks to quickly create profes­sional-looking grids for your images, testi­mo­nials, videos, and more. The Auto option automat­i­cally generates mobile-responsive rows and columns, while the Manual option provides more granular control.

Custom default shadow styles

The Styles menu now lets you edit shadow effects, including changing the default shadow style for images, buttons, and more. You can also add your own shadow styles, giving you complete control over this subtle and powerful design element.

Section specific styles

Here’s one for the theme creators out there. With WordPress 6.6 you have the ability to define style varia­tions for specific sections of a website, not just the theme as a whole. To enable this, you need to edit your theme’s theme.json file and declare the style variation (Click here for instruc­tions). Once this is set up, you can quickly change the styles of multiple blocks for areas like headers, footers, content sections, etc.

As a bonus, section styles also work perfectly with content imported from our public sample collection.

Block binding API upgrades

This release makes block bindings easier to use and more powerful. Origi­nally available since WordPress 6.5This feature allows users to connect (or “bind”) the contents of a block with the data of a custom field. Here’s how to create that in a post. WordPress 6.6 takes this a step further by allowing the option to edit custom field data by simply updating the block in the editor.

And more!

There are hundreds of updates for WordPress in version 6.6. What we have highlighted above is just a taste of the most notable and visible features. If you’re a developer and want to look a little more under the hood, you’ll find all the extras here WordPress 6.6 Field Guide.

Click below if you are a developer and want to take advantage of hosting your websites with WordPress.com:

*Photo and video credits: WordPress.org