As always, what’s shared here is being actively pursued, but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 6.8.
For a more detailed look at the work related to the block editor in WordPress 6.8, please refer to the 6.8 release cycle page and review the currently open Iteration issues. These Iteration issues reflect actively scoped work targeted for this release. Additionally, to gain insight into ongoing developments and future enhancements, you can explore the discussions and updates shared in the latest Gutenberg pull requests and tracking issues.
Design Improvements
The design focus will be on polish and fix, clearing ‘needs design feedback‘ issues.
The Style Book provides a comprehensive overview of your site’s colors, typography, and block styles in an organized layout. Each block example and style group is labeled, making it easy to preview and understand your theme’s current design settings. For classic themes that support the Style Book, site patterns have been relocated to Appearance > Design > Patterns, consolidating all design-related functionality from the Site Editor into one place. Previously, patterns were listed under Appearance > Patterns.
In zoom-out mode, users can now apply different section styles and designs directly from the toolbar, cycling through them and inspecting them in the context of the rest of the page. This enhancement Enhancements are simple improvements to WordPress, such as the addition of a hook, a new feature, or an improvement to an existing feature. streamlines the decision-making and production process (#67140).
Another user experience improvement can be found in the list of fonts: Each font family is now previewed in the font picker dropdown and gives users a better indication as to what the font will look like (#67118).
The outcome of the Image manipulation methods are now better communicated in the block editor. The success notices are now displayed at the bottom of the editor. The notices also come with a handy Undo link to revert to the original if necessary (#67314, #67312).
Design tools
- Post Comments Link: Add Border Support. (#68450)
- Post Template: Add Border and Spacing Support. (#64425)
- Query Total: Add Border Support. (#68323)
- Background supports: Add default controls supports. (#68085)
- Block supports: Show selected item in font family select control. (#68254)
- Fix: Ensure consistency in editor tools for navigation buttons and delete options. (#67253)
- Global Styles: Fix handling of booleans when stabilizing block supports. (#67552)
Support for Speculative Loading
Building upon the success of the Speculative Loading plugin, which has over 40,000 active installations, WordPress 6.8 plans to integrate speculative loading into core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. This feature utilizes the Speculation Rules API to prefetch URLs dynamically based on user interaction, aiming to improve performance metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). The current proposal has default configuration employing conservative prefetching to ensure safety and compatibility, but feedback is requested on this. Developers will have access to filters for customization, allowing adjustments to the speculative loading behavior as needed (#62503).
Polishing the Query Loop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop.
By polishing the query loop we are focusing on enhancements like filter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. by year, pagination, fetching results by adding offset, block spacing improvements, Sticky post not working when query type is default in editor, query loop depth set etc.
(This data comes from WordPress 6.8 Editorial Tasks and Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ releases from 19.4 to 20.2.)
Refining Data Views
Working on enhancements like Reduce the size of action buttons in Grid layout, Table layout improvements, Density option in table layout , Use badge component in dataview grids, Remove popover max height.
Working on fixing and enhancing List layouts, grid layouts, text truncation, padding and spacing in grid and list.
Zoom out to compose with patterns
With patterns getting more feature-rich and pervasive. This effort aims to provide a new, high-level approach to building and interacting with your site, with several key features in development:
- Improvements to UX User experience for dragging patterns (e.g. Hide Zoom Out Inserters when dragging into canvas).
- UX improvement on Zoom Out (e.g. Rely on Zoom level instead of Zoom Out, Zoom Out shortcut on Windows, Add Keyboard shortcut in editor, Move default background to the iframe iFrame is an acronym for an inline frame. An iFrame is used inside a webpage to load another HTML document and render it. This HTML document may also contain JavaScript and/or CSS which is loaded at the time when iframe tag is parsed by the user’s browser. component, Zoom animation scrollbar fix)
- Zoom out: fix for inserter
Follow this iteration issue for more information.
API launches and iterations
Interactivity API (Not on track for WordPress 6.8)
In WordPress 6.7, work focused on important improvements to enhance the stability and simplicity of the Interactivity API internals, the introduction of new APIs like getServerState/getServerContext and wp_interactivity_get_element, improvements to the types, and progress on the Gallery block lightbox and Query block’s Instant Search.
In WordPress 6.8, the primary focus will be on:
- Enhancing client-side navigation, advancing full page client-side navigation while addressing and improving the limitations of region-based client-side navigation.
- Finishing the lightbox of the Gallery Block and the Instant Search functionality for the Query and Search Blocks.
Work is also continuing to improve the documentation. Follow this tracking issue for more information.
- Support length property on strings and arrays on the server
- Interactivity API directives support invalid A resolution on the bug tracker (and generally common in software development, sometimes also notabug) that indicates the ticket is not a bug, is a support request, or is generally invalid. data attribute characters on the server
- Support for marking store actions that require synchronous event access (#68097)
Follow this iteration issue and this Trac view for more information.
Block Hooks API
The Block Hooks API is an extensibility mechanism that allows you to dynamically insert blocks into block themes. In WordPress 6.8, work will continue on improvements of Block Hooks.
HTML HyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. API
HTML API enhancements will be focused on HTML process speed improvements and new features like introducing safe composable HTML templating, Inner and outer HTML support.
Follow this iteration issue for more information.
Security enhancements
Various security-related enhancements are planned for WordPress 6.8, the most significant of which is the switch to using bcrypt for password hashing. This includes improvements to the algorithm that’s used for storing application passwords and security keys. A dedicated post will be published soon on make/core covering these changes in detail.
Additional performance improvements
A variety of initiatives are also focused on improved loading times like Lazy load post meta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress., Lazy load user capabilities in wp_user object, ORDER by RAND() speed improvements, cache the result of get_uploaded_header_images(), Improve cache generation in WP_Query class, and Cache duplicate calls to WP_Theme_JSON::sanitize. In preparation for the WordPress 6.8 release, several key performance improvements have been implemented in the block editor and collectively contribute to a more responsive and efficient editing experience.
- Navigation Block Optimization: Addressed performance issues in the site editor when handling navigation blocks with multiple submenu items, enhancing responsiveness during template editing (#68875).
- Selector Efficiency Enhancements: Improved the isBlockVisibleInTheInserter selector to prevent unnecessary computations, resulting in a more efficient block editor experience (#68898).
- StyleBook Resizing Improvement: Resolved issues causing unsmooth resizing in the StyleBook for classic themes, leading to a more fluid user experience (#68978).
- Event Handling Optimization: Introduced the withSyncEvent action wrapper utility to streamline event handling, reducing potential performance bottlenecks (#68097).
- Inserter Selector Optimization: Implemented changes to avoid unbounded requests in inserter selectors, enhancing the efficiency of block retrieval processes (#66817).
Follow this Trac view or this performance project board label for more information.
Continued Accessibility improvements
In WordPress 6.8, we are continuing our work on Accessibility enhancements including Audit of storybook components and Improvements on Grid layout semantics/navigation.
- Review usage of target=”_blank” in the admin (and super admin)
- Title attributes galore. They serve no useful purpose.
- Submit buttons on form fields in the Add Media panel
- Semantic elements for non-link links
- Enhancement: Add a wrong password message on password protected posts
- Code Editor: Linter (HTMLHint) should show error if checkbox doesn’t have associated <label>
- Media uploader does not restrict file upload `accepts` parameters based on current context
- Twenty Twenty: with horizontal menu, submenu should be dismissible
- Add prefixes to all admin notices (Warning, Error, Success, Info)
- Improve the admin notices accessibility
- Fix and improve arranging metaboxes
- Add a mechanism for accessible tooltips in core
- Twenty Twenty: Menu + Search can cause a scroll jump on close
- Excess text read with errors in Media Library
- The WordPress core password reset needs to pre-populate the username to meet WCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/. 2.2
- Validation of custom links in admin menu not accessible
- Simplify add_new_item labels for core post types
- Update the screen-reader-text CSS Cascading Style Sheets. class and its local implementations
- Missing “submit” button – bad accessibility
- Bring in lighter background for admin
- Add padding and color changes to buttons and inputs
- Change font weight of settings and other similar labels
- Adjust background alternate row on post and page tables
- core/site-title block adds aria-current to the blog (versus network, site) page when it is not the front page
- get_custom_logo does not apply the aria-current attribute in all cases
- Improve HTML semantics in Site Health Info tables
- Consider removing title attributes from Classic Editor scripts
Follow this tracking issue and this Trac view for more information.
Find something missing? Want to help?
If you have something you’re working on that you don’t see reflected in this post, please share a comment below so we can all be aware! If you’re reading this and want to help, a great place to start is by looking through each issue associated with each area or by diving into the Polish board where a curated set of issues are in place that anyone can jump in on.
Props @annezazu, @jeffpaul, @joemcgill, @flixos90, @fabiankaegy, @mamaduka, @johnbillion, @joedolson, @karmatosed for prepublish review.
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