WordPress 5.9 Field Guide

WordPress 5.9 unlocks the ability to build with blocks across all parts of your site, bringing advanced design tools to build your templates, themes, and style your sites in new and exciting ways.

Let’s take a look at what to expect in WordPress 5.9.

BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Editor

WordPress 5.9 might be the largest release of GutenbergGutenberg 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/ features since the initial Gutenberg launch in WordPress 5.0. The latest version includes a full suite of site editing tools bringing the block editor to the full screen. This includes a new way to build themes, new ways to create templates, and style your site. Plus a dozen new theme blocks to load dynamic content.

All of this is shown off in the beautiful new Twenty Twenty-Two default theme.

Review the block theme dev notedev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. for more information around block themes and how to get started building your own.

WordPress 5.9 incorporates all of the changes to the Gutenberg plugin since the last release until the code freeze which was Gutenberg 11.9; to see in detail all that these entail see the “What’s New” post for the releases: 10.8, 10.9, 11.0, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6, 11.7, 11.8, 11.9

Here are the dev notesdev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. related to block editor updates:

Performance

CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.

Internationalization

Themes & CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.

PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher 8.0 and 8.1

Tooling

Other Developer Updates

But wait, there’s more!

5.9 offers so much more! Over 100 bugs, 99 enhancements, 5 feature requests, and 51 blessed tasks have been marked as fixed in WordPress 5.9.

Here are a few additional:

  • Switch to block theme from customizer (Trac 54549)

#5-9, #field-guide