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What’s New in WordPress 6.1
The last major release of 2022, WordPress 6.1 contains significant updates to the full site editing and the block editor experience.
New Default Theme
WordPress 6.1 ships with a brand new default theme called, unsurprisingly, Twenty Twenty-Three. Out of the box, this theme is a minimalist design that encourages you to customise it using the 10 style variations it comes with. All of these styles are fully customizable using the site editor. The theme is the perfect starter theme.
Block Editor Changes
List and Quote Blocks Now Have Inner Blocks
One of the problems with bulleted lists was that if you wanted to move a list item up and down you had to manually delete and edit all the list items.
WordPress 6.1 brings inner blocks for Quote and List blocks. Basically, each list item is its own block and you can move list items up and down.
The Quote block
The Quote block is now also divided into inner blocks allowing you to style quote and cite blocks differently.
Featured Image in Cover Block
With WordPress 6.1, you can now select the featured image to be used for a cover block. After that, you can just set the featured image and it will start appearing inside the cover. Many beginners often confuse cover block and featured images. Hopefully, this will now allow them to just use cover block to display featured image for an article.
New & Improved Borders
WordPress 6.1 brings a lot of options to the design tools available for blocks. One of them is the more powerful border tool that is now available for several blocks.
You can use set top, right, bottom, left borders separately, and give them different colours and sizes. Previously users were able to only select the border radius for the image block. Now with WordPress 6.1, you can set border colour and size as well.
More Padding and Margin Options
WordPress 6.1 brings a ‘Dimensions’ tool to more blocks allowing users to set padding and margins. Users will also be able to visualize their changes with neat visual hints. You can also set margins for Spacer and Separator blocks, which allows you to create more spacious content layouts.
New and Improved Navigation Blocks
WordPress 6.1 now allows you to easily change the background and text colour for sub-menus. The Navigation now also allows you to easily choose a menu from the block toolbar or the sidebar panel.
Editor Design Refinements in WordPress 6.1
WordPress 6.1 ships with some noticable refinements to Editor design. These changes clean up the interface and aim to improve user experience.
Status & Visibility Panel Renamed to Summary
The Status & visibility panel is renamed to Summary. Template and Permalink panels are now removed and merged into the Summary panel. You can click on the URL field to change the Permalink or Template name to change template.
Time to Read in the Information Panel
The information panel now includes ‘Time to read’ information as well.
Site Icon Replaces the WordPress Logo
If you have set the site icon for your website, then it will be used as the View Posts button in the top left corner of the screen.
New Preferences Options
The Preferences section for the block editor now includes two new options. First, there is ‘Always open list view’ which shows the list sidebar by default for all articles. Then, there is ‘Show button text labels’ which replaces icons in toolbars with text labels.
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04.11.22
Tony Cook
Tony is co-founder, lead website designer and head of digital at CuCo Creative. Since graduation with a BA(Hons) in Advertising and Graphic Communications, he has developed his website designer and developer skills, with WordPress being his preferred choice of CMS. Tony boasts over 25 years hands-on experience in creative design and over 20 years in digital design. Tony is responsible for the website design team at CuCo and regularly builds great bespoke websites for CuCo's clients. Whilst the digital world has become a real strength, Tony does like to keep his foot in the creative design side of the agency, helping the design team deliver impactful branding solutions and impactful marketing campaigns.
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