WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” was released today, in honor of Esperanza Spalding, an American jazz bassist who became a talented singer, songwriter and songwriter in her 20s.
Versions 9.3 – 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin are included in this update, bringing hundreds of improvements and bug fixes that make working with the block editor more efficient and enjoyable.
One of the highlights is the new drag and drop features in the block inserter. Users can now drag blocks and block patterns directly into the content area of the post, making building the page even faster.
Many of the user-facing editor enhancements in this release give the user more control when using existing tiles:
- Full height alignment: Blocks like the cover block can now have the option to expand to fill the entire viewing window.
- Button Block: The button block now supports vertical alignments, and you can set the width of a button to a predefined percentage.
- Social icons pack: You can now change the size of the icons in the Social Icon block.
- Font size in more places: You can now change the font size in the List and Code blocks
This version also improves the UI for block variations to include the variation icon and description in the block inspector and a new drop-down list to allow you to switch between variations. Reusable blocks have been updated to be saved at the same time as the post is saved. Some more improvements have been added in version 10.1 of the Gutenberg plugin, which is not yet included in the core. If you use reusable tiles frequently, you may want to install the plug-in to take advantage of the expanded UI.
In addition to all the editor improvements, WordPress 5.7 features a simplified color palette for the administrator. It standardizes the palette to seven main colors and a range of 56 shades. One of the advantages is that all shades meet the requirements of the contrast ratio recommended by WCAG 2.0 AA in relation to white or black.
Theme and plug-in developers who want to better match the administrator’s color scheme can easily refer to the new standard tones to make their products more comfortable with the WordPress administrator. The existing core classes of WordPress have also been updated with the new color palette so that plug-in authors can use them to work with the new standardized palette.
One of the most interesting technical enhancements in 5.7 is a new one-click migration from HTTP to HTTPS. WordPress can now detect whether the user’s hosting environment supports HTTPS and update with the click of a button, handling rewrites of mixed content whenever possible. This feature is available on the website’s health recommendations screen.
WordPress 5.7 continues cleanup in progress after upgrading to jQuery 3.5.1, which will result in the removal of the jQuery Migrate plugin. It fixes several depreciations of jQuery in external libraries, cleaning up many JQMIGRATE notices.
Developers may also be interested in the new filter-based robot API included in 5.7. Enables central management of the content of the robots meta tag injected into the page and includes a setting to toggle whether search engines are allowed to display large media from the site. By default, a max-image-preview:large robots directive that will be injected into the robots meta tag based on the new configuration.
Version 5.7 also includes native support for slow loading iframes, a continuation of WordPress support for slow loading images that came with 5.5. This should improve the loading of pages that include embeddings and other types of iframes.
Check out the WordPress 5.7 field guide for technical details on all the news in this release. This update is the result of the work of 481 volunteer employees who collaborated on 250 tickets on Trac and more than 950 pull requests on GitHub.