Earlier this week the world said hello to WordPress 5.7, the first WordPress release of the year. The release is nicknamed ‘Esperanza’, following WordPress’ well-established convention of naming major releases after jazz musicians, and you can find out more about the releases’s namesake, Esperanza Spalding, here.
WordPress 5.7 features a number of aesthetic and performance changes, and in today’s post we want to touch on some of the highlights you can enjoy with this latest release. WordPRess 5.7 was managed by a release team of nine (including Matt Mullenweg taking the reins as Release Lead) and over 480 volunteer contributors.
Many of the key improvements here come back to ease of use and plenty of tweaks have been made to the editor to make it easier than ever to create content for your audience. Here are just a few of the changes, according to the team behind 5.7:
Font-size adjustment in more places: now, font-size controls are right where you need them in the List and Code blocks. No more trekking to another screen to make that single change!
Reusable blocks: several enhancements make reusable blocks more stable and easier to use. And now they save automatically with the post when you click the Update button.
Inserter drag-and-drop: drag blocks and block patterns from the inserter right into your post.
Users will notice a default colour palette has been introduced, including seven core colours and an additional range of fifty six shades to work equally well against white or black backgrounds. The new palette can be found in the WordPress dashboard default colour scheme and can be used in the creation of themes, plugins, and additional resources.
There have also been a number of improvements made to Gutenberg’s block system, as per the following quote from the WordPress 5.7 release post:
Full-height alignment: have you ever wanted to make a block, like the Cover block, fill the whole window? Now you can.
Buttons block: now you can choose a vertical or a horizontal layout. And you can set the width of a button to a preset percentage.
Social Icons block: now you can change the size of the icons.
Other notable changes include:
- Switch from HTTP to HTTPS more easily than ever before with a single click as WordPress will now automatically update the database URLs when the switch is made.
- WordPress 5.7 has made it simple to set up lazy-load functionality for iframes, with a loading=”lazy” attribute added to iframe tags as a default when width and height parameters are specified.
There are many other changes included in the release of 5.7 and you can find the full breakdown of developer notes over in the WordPress 5.7 Field Guide.
