What you need to know about WordPress 6.6?

WordPress NextMajor version 6.6 scheduled in July 16, 2024Release. It won't be as developer-centric as WordPress 6.5, but there's still a lot to be excited about: improvements to existing APIs, community blueprints, and extended global style changes. Let's take a look at the most important updates and changes in WordPress 6.6, as well as some of the enhancements in the latest version of Gutenberg.

API Enhancements

Ever since the WordPress 6.5 Since its introduction in the Interactivity APIrespond in singingBlock Bindings APIThe Interactivity API update will not focus on adding new features, but rather on better test coverage, code quality, error reporting, debugging tools, and bug fixes.

With the release of Gutenberg 18.2, a number of enhancements to the Interactivity API are now available, including the ability todata-wp-onMultiple event listeners are declared for the same event type on the same element and the query block has been updated to allow for third-party interaction blocks.Gutenberg 18.3 also includes an Interactivity API via theExperimental setup for full page client navigation. This is very cool, but of course it's still in the experimental stage and may break some parts of the theme. It's best to start with thethis localitymaybeWordPress PlaygroundTry it out in the middle.

Changes to the block binding API will allow for editing connected sources directly from the block, with the goal of potentially making the editor API public in 6.6. There is also some work being explored to create a UI for bindings, but this may not be done in WordPress 6.6.

Block Hooks API introduced in WordPress 6.4will continue to evolve with a focus on determining the appropriate UI for hook blocks and improving the developer experience. html APIFurther development will be done with the aim of completing and relying on a customized and compliant encoder/decoder and designing how to communicate when retrospective changes are made to an HTML document.

WordPress Playground's Blueprint Library

If you haven't used theWordPress Playground, now is a good time to try it.Community CreatedThe official repository for Playground blueprints has been created, offering live demos of various WordPress settings.

Say goodbye to PHP 7.0 and 7.1!

Support for these PHP versions is scheduled to be removed in WordPress 6.6. PHP 7.2.24 will be supported in 6.6. There's no hard and fast rule about when WordPress will remove support for PHP versions, but John Blackbourn has written about it in theMake WordPress BlogThe general process is outlined above:

"There is no specific percentage of PHP version usage before WordPress was no longer supported, but historically the project maintainers have been using 5% as a benchmark," he wrote. "The total utilization of PHP 7.0 and 7.1 is now well below 2.45%, so the process of raising the minimum supported PHP version in this release can continue to move forward."

Theme and design

Some of the latest updates include the introduction of negative margin support and experimental full-page client-side navigation.

Color and font style changes

The extended global style variant will allow users to mix and match sets of colors and typography defined through the global style variant. This feature will provide theme developers with more flexibility and customization options.Gutenberg 18.3 introduces a way of definingColor- or typography-specific global style variantsThe new methods. These will appear in the Site Editor sidebar under the new Colors and Typography panel instead of the full variant.

Default font size setting

Introduced a newsettings.typography.defaultFontSizesproperty that lets developers disable the selection of the default font size in the user interface. This solves a long-standing problem with the core size being displayed alongside the theme's registered size.

Layout Updates

Several updates have been made to the layout and associated styles, including the introduction of negative margin support and full-page client-side navigation experiments. These updates will provide theme developers with more flexibility and customization options.

Text Alignment Block Support

Introduced new for block developerstypography.textAlignsupport attribute. The ultimate goal is to migrate this functionality to core blocks that use temporary text alignment and support it through global styles.

Publishing classes in the editor

Starting with Gutenberg 18.3, developers can use the standard post class in editors (returned by the functionget_post_class()). This is only shown when using the query loop block, and should make it easier to use the context class to consistently style posts.

Block Repair

Gutenberg 18.2 fixes several issues in various blocks, including removing the wrapper from the latest post block in the editor<div>, adding missing classes to the front end, and reducing the CSS specificity of the Pullquote block's padding and separator block's border styles.

Background image update

Gutenberg 18.1 addedtheme.jsonInitial support and UI controls for top-level site background images. As part of a number of follow-up tasks to improve this functionality, Gutenberg 18.2 includes a number of UI updates, including the default background size value defined in the display of thetheme.json, as well as updating text labels to avoid possible confusion between background images and colors.

Negative margin support {#negative margin support}

Negative margins have been made available through a UI control in the editor. This feature was previously available through thetheme.jsonCustom spacing presets are supported, but are now more theme user friendly.

Default theme update

Several updates have been made to the default theme, including fixing a font size issue with the Pullquote block, adding checks for thewp_is_error()to prevent fatal errors on PHP 8.0+, and updated headers to better support the Block Hooks API.