WordPress 6.1 has now officially been released! This major update was code-named Misha, after a jazz musician. This was WordPress’s third and final major release of 2022. Along with the expected Twenty-Twenty three theme, there are so many more features to unpack, so let’s summarise the most exciting features below.
Twenty Twenty-Three Theme
This year, the Twenty Twenty-Three default theme comes packed with many more features than you would typically expect. The main feature is the 10 distinct style features that are accessibility ready. No longer do websites with a default WordPress theme need to look the same! If you are unsure how to get started with WordPress, this new default theme is a perfect way to get started.
Accessibility
We feel this is an important new upgrade to mention first. As mentioned above in the Twenty Twenty-Three theme, the new style features include improved accessibility features. This is extremely important to foster an inclusive community and support users all around the world. On top of this, WordPress has now made changes to their previous themes to mark them as accessibility-ready too! You can find out more about these exciting changes here.
New Templates
Site owners can now have more control over their sites. For example, you can now edit template parts like the header and footer easily and quickly with the new search-and-replace feature.
Menus
In this new update, menus are now easier to edit. The controls now have their place in the block settings so you can edit a menu that is already open without searching for it.
The mobile menu gets a fantastic new update too. One of the big features is changing the mobile menu icon with just a few clicks so that you can make the mobile menu truly yours.
Typography
The new theme includes a new feature called Fluid Typography. This feature allows you to adjust the font size for various screen sizes, which will make your website readable on different devices, including tablets and mobiles. Responsive web design has been around for a long while now, but adding this option to the theme makes it much easier for beginners and website owners to adjust who may not have any coding experience.
On the subject of typography, you can now add other elements inside your lists and quote blocks. For example, you may want to have a heading in your quote block and this is now made possible with inner blocks.
Site Editor
Did you ever make customisations to your site editor preferences and then return later to see those settings reverted? This is now a thing of the past with the new persistent editor. Previously your preferences would be stored in the browser, so if you cleared your browser history this would be removed. Now they are stored in the server, so even if you clear your browser history this won’t affect your customisations.
Improved Style system
With the latest update, CSS rules for margins, padding, typography, colours and borders within the style engine are all in one place. This makes processes a whole lot easier so you don’t need to go to multiple locations to make customisations.
Block Template parts in classic themes
Not quite ready to move to the Twenty Twenty-Three theme? No problem! With this new feature, you can enable block template parts in the classic WordPress themes. So for example, if you wanted to edit the footer of a site using blocks, all you need to do is enable custom blocks in your classic theme and then add a footer.html file inside your theme parts directory. More information on this can be found here.
Improved Performance
While many website owners feel that WordPress websites are slow and bulky, (which we have proven otherwise here) there has been a massive update in performance in WordPress 6.1. In this version, the improved performance addresses issues in more than 25 tickets reported to WordPress. More information on what’s been fixed can be found in the Performance Field Guide.
Summary
As you can see, in summary, WordPress 6.1 is a HUGE update and there are many more features to explore! All of these new features and fixes can be found on the WordPress 6.1 release page.