Word­Press 6.5 is here! This is the first big update of the year 2024 and a par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ing one. 

It is packed with new fea­tures, loads of bug fix­es, and improve­ments that will make your web­site man­age­ment and con­tent cre­ation even better. 

We will walk you through some of the major high­lights of Word­Press 6.5 with screen­shots and details so that you can learn how to use these new features.

Impor­tant: Don’t for­get to cre­ate a com­plete Word­Press back­up before doing the update.

Now, let’s look at what you’ll find in Word­Press 6.5 after the update. Here is a quick list of the major fea­tures we will explore: 

Introducing the Font Library

The font library final­ly makes its offi­cial debut with the Word­Press 6.5 release. It allows users to man­age, install, and use fonts inside the Word­Press editor. 

The font library can be man­aged by launch­ing the Site Edi­tor (Appear­ance » Edi­tor) and switch­ing to the ‘Styles’ pan­el. After that, click on ‘Typog­ra­phy’, and you will see the fonts cur­rent­ly avail­able with your Word­Press theme. 

Next, you can click on the ‘Man­age fonts’ but­ton to open the library in a popup. 

From here, you can upload fonts from your com­put­er or switch to the ‘Install Fonts’ tab and con­nect to the Google Fonts library. 

Sim­ply click on the ‘Allow access to Google Fonts’ but­ton, and you will be able to browse fonts that are avail­able for installation. 

You can choose any font, and once you install it, it will be down­loaded and served direct­ly from your web­site (not from Google servers). 

With the new font library fea­ture, you don’t need to install a typog­ra­phy plu­g­in just to use a cus­tom font on your site. 

Plugin Dependencies

Have you ever installed a Word­Press plu­g­in, strug­gled with it for a while, and found out it needs anoth­er plu­g­in to work? 

Word­Press 6.5 fix­es that issue for the end users and plu­g­in developers. 

Devel­op­ers can now add a ‘Requires Plu­g­ins’ entry into the plu­g­in head­er and men­tion the addi­tion­al plu­g­ins required to be installed and acti­vat­ed for their plu­g­in to work.

Now, when users install a plu­g­in that depends on oth­er plu­g­ins, they will see an error when they try to acti­vate it (post-instal­la­tion).

On the Plu­g­ins page, users can also see which plu­g­ins are required. 

Those plu­g­ins will then need to be installed and acti­vat­ed by the user.

Once all the required plu­g­ins are acti­vat­ed, the user can acti­vate the main plu­g­in that needs them.

Cur­rent­ly, this fea­ture can only install plu­g­ins host­ed on WordPress.org. This means third-par­ty or pre­mi­um plu­g­ins host­ed else­where can­not use this fea­ture to man­age dependencies. 

Block Editor Improvements

The block edi­tor is the default Word­Press edi­tor. This is where you cre­ate your con­tent and edit your pages. 

Each Word­Press release has many improve­ments, and new fea­tures have been added to the editor. 

Obvi­ous­ly, 6.5 is no dif­fer­ent, and you may want to take note of some of those fea­tures, as they can save you a lot of time. 

Connect Blocks to Custom Fields 

Cus­tom fields in Word­Press allow you to add cus­tom meta­da­ta to Word­Press posts and pages. For more details, you can see our glos­sary entry on cus­tom fields.

They have been around for a long time, and devel­op­ers and advanced Word­Press users use them in many dif­fer­ent ways. 

Word­Press 6.5 intro­duces a new Block Bind­ing API, which allows users to use cus­tom fields and oth­er dynam­ic data as attrib­ut­es for indi­vid­ual blocks. 

This will also allow devel­op­ers to dis­play dynam­ic data inside the stan­dard core blocks pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly. Here is a detailed overview of Block Bind­ing API on Make Word­Press Core. 

For those of you who are adven­tur­ous, here is a quick way to try it out. 

Sim­ply edit a Word­Press post and add these two cus­tom fields:

• mood
• weath­er

You can see below what this should look like.

After that, in the block edi­tor set­tings, switch to the code edi­tor view. 

You can do this by click­ing on the three-dot menu in the top right cor­ner of the screen and select­ing ‘Code Editor’. 

Next, in the con­tent area, you need to add the fol­low­ing code to a text field, such as a Para­graph block: 

<!-- wp:paragraph {"metadata":{"bindings":{"content":{"source":"core/post-meta","args":{"key":"mood"}}}}} -->
<p></p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->
 
<!-- wp:paragraph {"metadata":{"bindings":{"content":{"source":"core/post-meta","args":{"key":"weather"}}}}} -->
<p></p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

You can now save your changes and pre­view your post and page. 

From here, you will be able to see the meta key val­ues dis­played in your block code. 

Smart Overlay for the Cover Block

The Cov­er block includes a cool enhance­ment in Word­Press 6.5. It will now auto­mat­i­cal­ly choose an over­lay cov­er based on the image or the col­or you use for the block. 

Then, you can eas­i­ly adjust the over­lay opac­i­ty to match your design. 

Drop Shadow Effect 

The drop shad­ow effect allows you to give the illu­sion of depth and make cer­tain ele­ments in your lay­out look prominent. 

Word­Press 6.5 adds the drop shad­ow effect to the Image, Column(s), and But­tons blocks. Plus, you can choose from a few dif­fer­ent drop shad­ow styles to bet­ter match your design.

Block Settings in List View

The list view in the block edi­tor gives you a bird’s eye view of your con­tent lay­out. It is par­tic­u­lar­ly handy for lengthy arti­cles, land­ing pages, and com­plex page layouts. 

Pre­vi­ous­ly, you had to click on the three-dot menu next to an item to see its set­tings in the list view. In Word­Press 6.5, you can now just right-click to access block settings. 

Rename Blocks in List View

Word­Press 6.5 also allows you to rename any block in the list view. This helps you bet­ter orga­nize and under­stand the lay­out of your content. 

Improved Link Control Adds NoFollow Checkbox

Link con­trol (the insert link pop­up) has sig­nif­i­cant changes in Word­Press 6.5 to make it more user-friendly. 

First, it will high­light your blog and front pages with dif­fer­ent icons. 

Sec­ond­ly, once you have added a link, click­ing on it will show you a bet­ter con­text menu. 

From here, you can see where the link goes, edit the link, unlink, or copy it with a click. 

Go ahead and click on the edit link but­ton and then click to expand the Advanced menu. 

Now, final­ly, you can choose to make a link nofol­low in Word­Press out of the box. 

How­ev­er, you will notice that open­ing a link in a new win­dow or mak­ing it nofol­low requires mul­ti­ple clicks. 

To make this eas­i­er, we rec­om­mend using All in One SEO for Word­Press. It shows all the options in the cus­tom link con­trol pan­el right away. 

Refreshed Preferences Panel

Word­Press 6.5 ships with a refreshed Pref­er­ences pan­el in the block editor.

Just click on the three-dot menu in the top-right cor­ner of the screen and then select ‘Pref­er­ences’.

The pan­el now includes Appear­ance and Acces­si­bil­i­ty sec­tions, along with improved cat­e­go­riza­tion of pre­vi­ous sections.

Site Editor Changes

The Full Site Edi­tor is where users can make changes to their site, much like the for­mer theme cus­tomiz­er.

Con­text: The Site Edi­tor is only avail­able in block themes with full site edi­tor sup­port. Old­er themes that don’t sup­port the site edi­tor are now called clas­sic themes. 

Word­Press 6.5 comes with sev­er­al improve­ments to the Site Edi­tor. Let’s check out some of the more sig­nif­i­cant changes. 

New Data Views

Word­Press 6.5 includes a bet­ter way to view your pages, block pat­terns, and tem­plates in the Site Editor.

You can view items in Grid view with large pre­views and sort them in dif­fer­ent orders.

You can also see items in the table view.

For instance, you see your page list and start edit­ing with­out leav­ing the Site Edi­tor interface.

Improved Style Revisions

Style revi­sions were intro­duced in Word­Press 6.3, allow­ing users to track and undo style changes to their site eas­i­ly, just like post revi­sions.

How­ev­er, style revi­sions only showed a time­line, and you had to browse it to see what changes were applied.

Word­Press 6.5 brings bet­ter style revi­sions, which show you a descrip­tion of changes made for each revision.

The brows­ing between dif­fer­ent revi­sions has also become smoother. You can eas­i­ly switch to a revi­sion by click­ing on the ‘Apply’ button.

Plus, you will also see the changes that were made but have not been saved yet.

New Interactivity API

Word­Press 6.5 comes with the Inter­ac­tiv­i­ty API, which pro­vides a frame­work for devel­op­ers to cre­ate mod­ern front-end inter­faces that don’t require com­plete page reloads.

Think of read­ing com­ments on your favorite blog, and a new com­ment just pops up as you are writ­ing your own reply. Or imag­ine a live search fea­ture that doesn’t slow down your website.

The team behind the project has made a demo web­site to show­case the capa­bil­i­ties of the Inter­ac­tiv­i­ty API. 

Hope­ful­ly, you will see some Word­Press plu­g­ins uti­liz­ing the API to cre­ate some cool things in the com­ing days. 

Under the Hood Changes in WordPress 6.5

This release also comes with a ton of behind-the-scenes changes to improve per­for­mance, fix bugs, and give devel­op­ers more options. 

Here are some of those changes. 

• Per­for­mance improve­ments: The Block and Site Edi­tors will load two times faster, and the input time will be four times faster than Word­Press 6.4. (Details)
• An improved library is intro­duced to load trans­la­tions much faster. (Details)
• Clas­sic themes can now add sup­port for appear­ance tools. (Details)
• The Block API now rec­og­nizes the viewScript­Mod­ule field in block.json meta­da­ta. (Details)
• Word­Press 6.5 updates Block Hooks to make them more wide­ly use­ful and includes some fre­quent­ly request­ed new fea­tures. (Details)
• Major updates to the HTML API, includ­ing the Tag Proces­sor, which can now scan every token in an HTML doc­u­ment. It now sup­ports more of the HTML spec­i­fi­ca­tion than Word­Press 6.4. (Details )

We hope this arti­cle helped you explore new fea­tures in Word­Press 6.5. While you are explor­ing dif­fer­ent areas of your Word­Press web­site, you may also want to opti­mize your web­site speed and per­for­mance or review essen­tial Word­Press secu­ri­ty set­tings to keep your site secure. 

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The post What’s New in Word­Press 6.5 (Fea­tures and Screen­shots) first appeared on WPBe­gin­ner.