Roadmap to 6.3

WordPress 6.3 is set to be released on August 8th, 2023, bringing a cohesive site editing experience thanks to expanded functionality, richer interfaces, and a dedicated focus on polish. This culmination of work will usher in the Phase 2 finale of Gutenberg. 

This release aims to make it easier for users to edit pages, manage navigation, and adjust styles all directly in the Site Editor. It also seeks to provide detailed, relevant information when exploring different parts of the site, such as showing the number of posts per page when viewing relevant blogblog (versus network, site) templates. In addition to these improvements, the release is anticipated to include convenient access to revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. across post types (templates, template parts) and styles, the ability to preview 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. themes, a command tool to speed up workflows, new curated patterns, font management options, and a few new blocks. The following sections will break down the main focus areas, including aspects of the broader CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. work that contribute to the overall WordPress experience.

Here’s a design prototype from @saxonfletcher that brings together some of those pieces to offer some inspiration and excitement: 

For a more detailed look at the work below, please refer to this overview issue for Phase 2 priorities (main tasks tracked here), the Phase 2 board (main tasks alongside broader potential high priority work), and the 6.3 Design board tasks.

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 6.3.

Polishing the Site Editor

The Site Editor has come a long way from a handful of templates to edit with a limited set of blocks in WordPress 5.9 to a full suite of template options, a plethora of blocks to design with, and powerful, evolving tools. 

This release brings cohesion and a more complete experience with the addition of content editing to the Site Editor alongside a strong distinction between templates and content. To support this work, revamped interfaces and pathways provide an intuitive way to edit and create what you want without leaving the Site Editor. At the same, the introduction of a command center tool helps one quickly jump to specific pages, templates, or template parts as inspiration strikes.

What follows are the high level projects bringing this to fruition:

• Introduce content editing, including clarifying the relationship between templates and content.
• Add a Navigation section to the Site Editor with nuanced options depending on the number of menus and complexity of each.
• Add a Pages section to the Site Editor. 
• Add a Styles section to the Site Editor. 
• Expose revisions (styles, templates, and template parts).
• Improve the loading state.
• Expand on the Detail views of page, template, template part, styles.
• Stabilize the Title Bar.
• Finalize Site Hub elements.
• Add a command center tool for easily accessing different parts of your site. More information here.
• Consider adding distraction free mode to Site Editor. 
• Keep custom templates and template parts across themes.

To enable more folks to explore the world of Block themes, theme previewing now works within the Site Editor itself, unlocking the ability to preview Block themes and introducing folks to the new Site Editor experience early on.

Iterating on blocks

The Navigation block continues to evolve with a focus on iterating on link control, offering a more nuanced display of menus in the Site Editor, and improving the quickly create draft pages. The wp:pattern block has some early technical changes underway to supercharge it, including explorations to allow for a synced state, possibly laying the groundwork for unifying concepts like template parts and reusable blocks. Alongside these main focuses, a few new blocks are being considered (Footnotes, Details, Table of Contents) and work is underway to add aspect ratio controls to image related blocks. 

• Iterate on the Navigation experience, including better fallbacks.
• Evolve the wp:pattern block.
• Surface aspect ratio tooling.
• Add spacing presets to the Spacer block.
• Consider adding the Details, Table of Contents, and Footnotes blocks.  

Expanding patterns

The power of patterns persist with more curated default patterns to look forward to along with deeper integration in high impact parts of the creation experience. There’s also an early effort underway to add the ability to create and save patterns, similar to the current reusable block experience. 

• Create (and enjoy) more curated patterns.
• Define creation flow for New Pages that focuses on patterns.
• Add modal for adding patterns for templates.  
• Surface patterns in template inspector.
• Update and unify modals for patterns.
• Introduce a UI to save patterns.

Stabilizing usability and prioritizing refinement

With the addition of new features, scaled interfaces, and new pathways, smaller pain points have begun to emerge across the creation experience. To stabilize and polish the experience, a separate board was created to capture these actionable items for developers to quickly solve. Outside of these smaller items, additional larger initiatives are also underway: 

• Implement Top Toolbar improvements.
• Iterate on List View drag and drop usability and keyboard behavior.
• Optimize and condense unlinked padding / margin controls.
• Allow custom naming in List View.
• Unify the link control UI.
• Explore a path towards “library” management with reusable blocks and template parts.

Enhancing design tools

Compared to prior releases, design tooling updates have focused less on adding brand new features and more on simplifying experiences, from managing fonts, or building on current functionality, like CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. for style variations and sticky positioning iteration. 

• Add an interface for font management.
• Expose Style Book in Styles details view.
• Iterate and expand on sticky positioning.
• Unlock CSS for style variations.
• Add a Box shadow component.

Leveling up APIs

To power much of the areas of work for this release, various APIs needed a dedicated focus to upgrade what was possible technically. 

• Fonts API to power font management. 
• Interactivity API implemented in a few Core blocks: Image block with the addition of lightbox, Navigation block, and File block.
• Block API improvements for wp:pattern efforts.

Addressing PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher items (8.x compatibility) 

Alongside an overarching 6.3 specific issue outlining what’s needed, there are also the following PHP version specific issues:

• WordPress 6.3 PHP 8.0 Open Tickets.
• WordPress 6.3 PHP 8.1 Open Tickets.
• WordPress 6.3 PHP 8.2 Open Tickets.

Focusing on performance

At a high level, the following areas are under active iteration:

• Enhancing the WP Scripts API with a script loading strategy.
• Fixing remaining issues with lazy-loading logic to improve LCP performance (56588, 58089, 58211, 58212, 58213).
• Implementing fetchpriority="high" to the LCP image of any page to improve LCP performance.

Outside of these areas, general performance improvements continue, including an improvement for TTFB targeting get_block_templates already showing strong signs of success, alongside a fix for WordPress’s asset handling to only enqueue registered assets once. Expect more to come ahead of the release.

General bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. fixes and enhancements 

In TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress., there are already 80+ tickets closed across various components and focuses. It’s still very early in the release cycle so expect that number to grow, along with the impact on overall experience of using WordPress.

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Thank you to @desrosj @matveb @saxonfletcher @priethor @richtabor @flixos90 for reviewing and helping with this post. If anything was missed, please leave a note in the comments.

#6-3, #release-roadmap