WordPress 6.1 is the third major release for WordPress in 2022, with more than 2,000 updates since WordPress 6.0 in May of 2022. 

Find out more about some key updates that are scheduled for November 1st.

New default theme

The new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, gathers all the latest site editing features in one place. It has ten pre-built style variations submitted by the WordPress community. They provide more starting point options for user customisation with variations in colours, typography and content layout.

The theme is the perfect baseline for testing templates and template parts, style variations, flexible typography and spacing, and all the features introduced with the latest versions of WordPress. And because of that, it is also a great tool for learning how to develop themes, templates, and block patterns with working examples.

Dynamic block spacing

Before WordPress 6.1, it was only possible to set custom spacing values in the editor, and theme authors were not allowed to specify fixed values for padding, margin, and gap. So, it was not possible to transfer spacing settings from one theme to another or to maintain spacing values when copying and pasting content between different websites.

Fluid typography

Currently, having a fixed font size can have some restrictions for designers, like making it difficult to make a more bold, visual expression. 

This new addition allows theme authors to enable font sizes that adapt to changes in screen size, for example, by growing larger as the viewport width increases, or smaller as it decreases (as shown in the example video below)

 

WP_Query Caching

There are a range of significant improvements to its CMS performance. A key one being the addition of caching to WP_Query in the database. 

Currently each query is unique, meaning if developers are running the same query multiple times, WordPress will run it without the consideration that it may have just been run. This is a performance hit and causes unnecessary processing by both PHP and the database server. On a site with many users and page views, this unnecessary processing costs money, and might even cause 503 errors while the system waits for these queries to finish.

The new update means that if the same database query is run more than once, the result will be loaded from cache and should result in billions of less repeated database queries.

We are WordPress experts that help companies transform their websites & innovate ideas through user-testing, analytics & structured development.

Get in touch today to get started.

 

References and further reading

https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2022/08/15/testing-and-feedback-for-the-fluid-typography-feature/

https://wordpress.org/news/2022/10/wordpress-6-1-release-candidate-2-now-available/ 

https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-6-1/#improved-block-types 

https://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/10/07/improvements-to-wp_query-performance-in-6-1/