This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 3 on a test server and site.
You can test WordPress 6.7 Beta 3 in four ways:
| Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). |
|---|---|
| Direct Download | Download the Beta 3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line | Use the following WP-CLI command:wp core update --version=6.7-beta3 |
| WordPress Playground | Use the 6.7 Beta 3 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. |
The current target date for the final release of WordPress 6.7 is November 12, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.7 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.7-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.
Catch up on what’s new in WordPress 6.7: Read the Beta 1 and Beta 2 announcements for details and highlights.
Your help testing the WordPress 6.7 Beta 3 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.7.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.
Between Beta 1, released on October 1, 2024, and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for November 5, 2024, the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
WordPress 6.7 Beta 3 contains more than 26 Editor updates and fixes since the Beta 2 release, including 18 tickets for WordPress core.
Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 3 using these links:
Code in motion hums,
New features bloom, bugs retreat,
6.7 calls.
Props to @joedolson and @jeffpaul for proofreading and review, and haiku from @colorful-tones.
]]>This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 2 on a test server and site.
You can test WordPress 6.7 Beta 2 in four ways:
| Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). |
|---|---|
| Direct Download | Download the Beta 2 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line | Use the following WP-CLI command:wp core update --version=6.7-beta2 |
| WordPress Playground | Use the 6.7 Beta 2 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. |
The current target date for the final release of WordPress 6.7 is November 12, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.7 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.7-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.
Catch up on what’s new in WordPress 6.7: Read the Beta 1 announcement for details and highlights.
Your help testing the WordPress 6.7 Beta 2 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.7.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.
Between Beta 1, released on October 1, 2024, and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for November 5, 2024, the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
WordPress 6.7 Beta 2 contains more than 18 Editor updates and fixes since the Beta 1 release, including 28 tickets for WordPress core.
Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 1 using these links:
Beta 2 arrives,
October’s code settles in,
Change rustles like leaves.
Props to @jeffpaul for proofreading and review.
]]>This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, set up a test environment or a local site to explore the new features.
You can test Beta 1 in any of the following ways:
| WordPress Beta Tester Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream. |
| Direct Download | Download the Beta 1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line (WP-CLI) | Use this WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.7-beta1 |
| WordPress Playground | Use a 6.7 Beta 1 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. No setup required–-just click and go! |
The scheduled final release date for WordPress 6.7 is November 12, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next six weeks is vital to ensuring the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.
Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether or not you have experience.
If you encounter an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
Curious about testing releases in general and how to get started? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.
WordPress 6.7 will include many new features that were previously only available in the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 6.7 in the What’s New in Gutenberg posts for versions 18.5, 18.6, 18.7, 18.8, 18.9, 19.0, 19.1, 19.2, and 19.3.
WordPress 6.7 Beta 1 contains over 500 enhancements and over 500 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 200 tickets for WordPress 6.7 Core. Here’s a glimpse of what’s coming:
Launching with WordPress 6.7, the new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Five, embodies ultimate flexibility and adaptability, showcasing how WordPress empowers you to tell your story with a rich selection of patterns and styles. Inspired by glimpses of natural beauty and ancestry heritage, it evokes ideas of impermanence, the passage of time, and continuous evolution–mirroring life’s journey. Experience effortless site creation with Twenty Twenty-Five and follow its progress or report issues on this GitHub repo.
The Zoom Out view simplifies your editing experience by allowing you to create and edit at the pattern level rather than focusing on individual blocks. Easily toggle this view from the toolbar to streamline your site-building process, making it faster and more intuitive to design pages using patterns.
Now supporting HEIC image uploads–automatically converted to JPEG for maximum compatibility–you can add high-quality images without worrying about browser support. Plus, enjoy auto-sizing for lazy-loaded images and expanded background image options at both individual and global levels, giving you greater control over your site’s visuals and performance.
Several blocks now come with expanded support options, enabling even more design possibilities. Notably, the long-requested shadow support for Group blocks has been added, a big win for designers and theme developers!
The latest WordPress release enhances the Preview Options in the block editor, empowering developers to customize content previews. A new API allows plugins and themes to add custom items to the preview dropdown menu, enabling users to see content in different formats or environments. This flexibility enriches the editing experience while maintaining the existing familiar Preview dropdown structure.
The Data Views introduced in 6.5 continue to be improved. This release is focused on refining the experience with a few new features aimed at making these views more flexible for customization and more functional to use.
Updates to this API in 6.7 polish and open most of the underlying APIs, improving the overall user experience, and add a user interface (UI) that allows you to connect attributes with custom fields to their binding sources. This new UI makes it possible to create bindings directly in a block instead of needing to use the Code Editor. By default admin and editor users can create and modify bindings, but this can be overridden with `block_editor_settings_all or map_meta_cap` filters.
The Query Loop block is improved, as it now automatically inherits the query from the template by default, eliminating the need for manual configuration. This means your posts display immediately in both the editor and on the front end, streamlining the process so users can focus on content without extra configuration needed.
An enhanced Styles interface allows for greater flexibility when creating, editing, removing, and applying font size presets. You can now easily modify the presets provided by a theme or create your own custom options. A key feature is the ability to toggle fluid typography, which enables responsive font scaling with additional options for finer control over responsiveness.
A new split view option has been introduced that allows you to access both the editor canvas and metaboxes while editing. This change will provide a consistent WYSIWYG experience between the editor and front end views.
With this release, developers can now more easily register custom block templates without complex filters. Streamline your development process and create custom templates with ease.
The features included in this first beta may change before the final release of WordPress 6.7, based on what testers like you find.
Get an overview of the 6.7 release cycle and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.7-related posts in the next few weeks for further details.
The WordPress community sponsors a monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. This reward doubles during the period between Beta 1 on October 1, 2024 and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for November 5, 2024. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
Lines of code arise,
Testing shapes the future path,
WordPress grows once more.
Props to @annezazu, @cbringmann, @colorful-tones, @courane01, @desrosj, @marybaum, and @priethor or reviewing and collaborating on this post!
]]>WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one. I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit.
What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against www.ads-software.com, WP Engine no longer has free access to www.ads-software.com’s resources.
WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.
The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, WP Engine will need to replicate that security research on their own.
Why should www.ads-software.com provide these services to WP Engine for free, given their attacks on us?
WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it, with them getting all of the profits and providing all of the services.
If you want to experience WordPress, use any other host in the world besides WP Engine. WP Engine is not WordPress.
]]>This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, please evaluate RC3 on a test server or a local environment.
Reaching this phase of the release cycle is a worthy achievement. While release candidates are considered ready for release, your testing is still vital to make sure everything in WordPress 6.6 is the best it can be.
You can test WordPress 6.6 RC3 in four ways:
| Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). |
|---|---|
| Direct Download | Download the RC3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line | Use the this WP-CLI command:wp core update --version=6.6-RC3 |
| WordPress Playground | Use the 6.6 RC3 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. |
The target for the WordPress 6.6 release is next Tuesday, July 16, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.6 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.6-related posts in the next few weeks for further details.
Thanks to your testing (and many other contributors‘ up to now) this release includes eight bug fixes for the Editor and 18 tickets for WordPress Core.
Get a recap of WordPress 6.6’s highlighted features in the Beta 1 announcement. For more technical information related to issues addressed since RC 2, you can browse the following links:
Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? You might want to make your first stop The WordPress 6.6 Field Guide. Then, check out this list:
WordPress is the world’s most popular open source web platform, thanks to a passionate community of people who collaborate on its development in a wide variety of ways. You can help—whether or not you have any technical expertise.
Testing for issues is critical to keeping WordPress speedy, stable, and secure. It’s also a vital way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.6. If you’re new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can also report it on WordPress Trac. Before you do either, you may want to check your issue against a list of known bugs.
Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.
If you build themes, plugins, blocks, or patterns, your efforts play an integral role in adding new functionality to WordPress and helping bring new people and ideas to the most vibrant (and massive!) open source community in the world.
Thanks for continuing to test your products with the WordPress 6.6 betas and release candidates. With RC3, you’ll want to make sure everything is working smoothly, and if it’s a plugin, update the “Tested up to” version in its readme file to 6.6.
If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.
Do you speak a language other than English? ?Espa?ol? Fran?ais? Русский? 日本語? ??????? ?????? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages.
One week to go. Then:
Open the paintbox! Try the tools!
Play a new jazz tune.
This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, please evaluate RC2 on a test server or a local environment.
Reaching this phase of the release cycle is a worthy achievement. While release candidates are considered ready for release, your testing is still vital to make sure everything in WordPress 6.6 is the best it can be.
You can test WordPress 6.6 RC2 in four ways:
| Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). |
|---|---|
| Direct Download | Download the RC2 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line | Use the this WP-CLI command:wp core update --version=6.6-RC2 |
| WordPress Playground | Use the 6.6 RC2 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. |
The target for the WordPress 6.6 release is July 16, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.6 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.6-related posts in the next few weeks for further details.
Thanks to your testing and many other contributors‘ up to now, this release includes more than 19 bug fixes for the Editor and more than 20 tickets for WordPress Core.
Get a recap of WordPress 6.6’s highlighted features in the Beta 1 announcement. For more technical information related to issues addressed since Beta 3, you can browse the following links:
Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? You might want to make your first stop The WordPress 6.6 Field Guide. Then, check out this list:
WordPress is the world’s most popular open source web platform, thanks to a passionate community of people who collaborate on its development in a wide variety of ways. You can help—whether or not you have any technical expertise.
Testing for issues is critical to keeping WordPress speedy, stable, and secure. It’s also a vital way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.6. If you’re new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can also report it on WordPress Trac. Before you do either, you may want to check your issue against a list of known bugs.
Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.
From now until the final release candidate of WordPress 6.6 (scheduled for July 9), the financial reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities doubles. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
If you build themes, plugins, blocks, or patterns, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users.?
Thanks for continuing to test your products with the WordPress 6.6 beta releases. With RC2, you’ll want to finish your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.6.
If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.
Do you speak a language other than English? ?Espa?ol? Fran?ais? Русский? 日本語? ??????? ?????? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages.
6.6 draws near.
In two weeks the final’s here.
Test. Test. Then test more.
Props to @juanmaguitar, @meher, @desrosj and @atachibana for peer review.
]]>This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, please evaluate RC1 on a test server or a local environment.
Reaching this phase of the release cycle is a worthy achievement. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing is still vital to make sure everything in WordPress 6.6 is the best it can be.
You can test WordPress 6.6 RC1 in four ways:
| Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). |
|---|---|
| Direct Download | Download the RC1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line | Use the this WP-CLI command:wp core update --version=6.6-RC1 |
| WordPress Playground | Use the 6.6 RC1 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup. |
The current target for the WordPress 6.6 release is July 16, 2024. Get an overview of the 6.6 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.6-related posts in the next few weeks for further details.
Hard string freeze: From now until July 16, there is a hard string freeze in place—no strings may change, and no new strings may be committed. That’s to give the Polyglots team time to translate WordPress 6.6 into as many languages as possible before final release.
Two-committer signoff: Commits in the RC period also require two Core committers to sign off on every merge. Since release candidates are supposed to be ready to go, only major fixes and blessed tasks should merge at this late date.
Thanks to your testing and many other contributors‘ up to now, this release includes more than 40 bug fixes for the Editor and more than 40 tickets for WordPress Core.
Get a recap of WordPress 6.6’s highlighted features in the Beta 1 announcement. For more technical information related to issues addressed since Beta 3, you can browse the following links:
Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? These recent posts cover some of the latest updates:
WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people who collaborate on and contribute to to its development. The resources below outline a wide variety of ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, whether or not you have any technical expertise.
Testing for issues is critical to making sure WordPress is speedy and stable. It’s also a vital way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.6. If you’re new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can also report it on WordPress Trac. Before you do either, you may want to check your issue against a list of known bugs.
Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.
From now until the final release candidate of WordPress 6.6 (scheduled for July 16), the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities doubles. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
If you build themes, plugins, blocks or patterns, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users.
Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.6 beta releases. With RC1, you’ll want to finish your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.6.
If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.
Do you speak a language other than English? ?Espa?ol? Fran?ais? Русский? 日本語? ??????? ?????? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages.
We’re here already?
RC1 means three weeks left.
Have some fun—come test!
This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do.
Instead, test Beta 3 on a local site or a testing environment in any of these four ways:
| Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). |
|---|---|
| Direct Download | Download the Beta 3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line | Use this WP-CLI command:wp core update --version=6.6-beta3 |
| WordPress Playground | Use a 6.6 Beta 3 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go!? |
The target release date for WordPress 6.6 is July 16, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next four weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.
If you run into an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
The WordPress community sponsors a financial reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. That reward doubles between Beta 1, which landed June 4, and the final Release Candidate (RC), which will happen July 9. Please follow the project’s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this HackerOne page and in this security white paper.
Catch up with what’s new in 6.6: check out the Beta 1 announcement for the highlights.
Beta 3 packs in more than 50 updates to the Editor since the Beta 2 release, including 39 tickets for WordPress core:
The beta cycle is all about fixing the bugs you find in testing.
Do you build themes? Feedback from testing has already prompted a change in the way you offer style variations to your users.
In Beta 1, if you made preset style variations for your theme, it automatically generated a full set of color-only and type-only options your users could mix and match across the different variations.
In Beta 3, your theme no longer generates those options automatically—you do. So you can present a simpler set of choices, curated to guide users’ efforts to more pleasing results. For more insight into the rationale, see this discussion.
Thanks again for this all-important contribution to WordPress!
Props to @meher, @rmartinezduque, @atachibana, and @mobarak?for collaboration and review.
Beta ends at 3
One more week, then comes RC
When we freeze the strings!
This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do.
Instead, test Beta 2 on a local site or a testing environment in any of these four ways:
| Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). |
|---|---|
| Direct Download | Download the Beta 2 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line | Use this WP-CLI command:wp core update --version=6.6-beta2 |
| WordPress Playground | Use a 6.6 Beta 2 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go! |
The target release date for WordPress 6.6 is July 16, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next five weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.
If you run into an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
The WordPress community sponsors a financial reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. That reward doubles between Beta 1, which landed June 4, and the final Release Candidate (RC) that will happen July 9. Please follow the project’s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this HackerOne page and in this security white paper.
Catch up with what’s new in 6.6: check out the Beta 1 announcement for the highlights.
Beta 2 packs in more than 50 updates to the Editor since the Beta 1 release, including 40+ tickets for WordPress core:
The beta cycle is all about fixing the bugs you find in testing. Thanks again for this vitally important contribution to WordPress!
Props to @priethor, @dansoschin, @davidb, @atachibana, @meher, @webcommsat, and @juanmaguitar for collaboration and review.
Testing is vital:
It makes everything better.
Let’s find all the bugs!
This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do.
Instead, install Beta 1 on local sites and testing environments in any of these four ways:
| Plugin | Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream). |
|---|---|
| Direct Download | Download the Beta 1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website. |
| Command Line | Use this WP-CLI command:wp core update --version=6.6-beta1 |
| WordPress Playground | Use a 6.6 Beta 1 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go! |
The scheduled final release date for WordPress 6.6 is July 16, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next six weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.
Features in this Beta release may be changed or removed between now and the final release. Early attention from testers like you is critical to finding and reporting potential bugs, usability issues, or compatibility problems to make sure developers can address them before the final release. You don’t need any contribution experience, and this is a fantastic way to begin your WordPress contributor story!
If you run into an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
Want to know more about testing in general, and how to get started? Follow the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.
Like every version since 5.0 in 2018, WordPress 6.6 will integrate a host of new features from the last several releases of the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 6.5 in the What’s New in Gutenberg posts for versions 17.8, 17.9, 18.0, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, and 18.4. The final version will also include Gutenberg 18.5; the Beta 2 post will link to that.
WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 contains 97 enhancements and 101 fixes for the editor, in a total of about 206 tickets for WordPress 6.6 Core.
The WordPress community sponsors a monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. That reward doubles during the period between Beta 1 on June 4 and the final Release Candidate (RC) that will happen June 25. Please follow the project’s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this HackerOne page and in this security white paper.
This year’s second major release is about polish and finesse. Features that landed in the last few releases have new flexibility and smoother flows—and a few new tricks. And of course there are a few brand-new features.
Part of the groundwork for phase 3, Data Views get new and improved experience of working with information in the Site Editor. A new layout consolidates patterns and template parts, gets you to general management views in fewer clicks, and packs in a wide range of refinements.
What if you could keep a synced pattern‘s look and feel everywhere it appears—keeping it on brand—but have different content everywhere it appears?
For instance, maybe you‘re building a pattern for recipes. Ideally, you want to keep the overall design of the recipe card consistent on every post that will have a recipe. But the recipe itself—the ingredients, the steps, special notes on technique—will be different every time.
And perhaps, in the future, other people might need to change the design of the recipe pattern. It would be nice to know they can do that, and that the content in existing recipes will stay right where it is.
In version 6.6, you can make all that happen, and overrides in synced patterns are the way you do it.
Up to now, when you had a block selected and then opened the block Inserter, you only saw the blocks you were allowed to add to your selected block. Where were all the others?
In 6.6, when you have a block selected, you get two lists. First, there’s the list of blocks you can insert at your selected block. Then you get a list with all the other blocks. So you can get an idea of what you can use in your selected block, and what other blocks you could use in another area. In fact, if you select a block from that second list, WordPress 6.6 will add it below your block, to use in whatever you build next.
Version 6.6 brings the post and site editors closer together than ever. So whether you’re writing for a post in the post editor or a page in the Site Editor, your experience will be about the same.
If a block theme comes with style variations, 6.6 vastly expands your design options right out of the box, without installing or configuring a single thing. Because in 6.6, your theme pulls the color palettes and typography style sets out of its installed variations to let you mix and match for a whole world of expanded creative expression.
Do you build themes? Now you can define style options for separate sections of multiple blocks, including inner blocks.
Then your users can apply those block style variations to entire groups of blocks, effectively creating branded sections they can curate across a site.
To make it easier for your variations to override the global styles CSS, those styles now come wrapped in `:root`. That limits their specificity. For details, read the full discussion on GitHub.
Grid is a new variation for the Group block that lets you arrange the blocks inside it as a grid. If you’ve been using a plugin for this, now you can make your grids natively.
You heard right: You can do everything with patterns in Classic themes that you can in a block theme. You can see all the patterns available to you in a single view and insert a pattern on the fly.
They’re here: negative margin values, so you can make objects overlap in your design. As a guardrail, you can only set a negative margin by typing an actual negative number, not by using the slider. That’s to keep people from adding negative values they didn’t intend.
Now you can have the convenience of setting all your plugins to auto-update and the inner peace you get from knowing that if anything goes wrong, 6.6 will do a rollback. Automatically.
This post reflects the latest changes as of June 4, 2024.
Again, the features in this first beta may change, based on what testers like you find.
Get an overview of the 6.6 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.6-related posts in the next few weeks for further details.
Negative margins
Embellish all the new ways
To design and build
Thanks very much to @meher, @audrasjb, @fabiankaegy, @colorful-tones, @davidbaumwald, @dansoschin, @desrosj, @atachibana, @ehtis, @adamsilverstein, @joedolson, and @webcommsat for reviewing and collaborating on this post!
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