Gutenberg Times: Source of Truth (WordPress 6.8) - Digital Media Marketing, and Technology News

Ahead of WordPress 6.8 Beta release and in absence of Anne McCarthy, we publish the Source of Truth a second time on the Gutenberg Times.

With me, I mean all the collaborators on this post: Krupal Lakhia, Justin Tadlock, Jonathan Bossenger, and JuanMa Garrido.

Changelog

Any changes will be cataloged here as the release goes on.

Important note/guidelines

Please do not copy and paste what is in this post since this will be shared with many people. This should be used to inspire your own content and to ensure that you have the best information about this release. If you do copy and paste, keep in mind that others might do the same, opening the door for some awkwardness around duplicated content out on the web.

Each item has been tagged using best guesses with different high level labels so that you can more readily see at a glance who is likely to be most impacted.
Each item has a high-level description, visuals (if relevant), and key resources if you would like to learn more.

Overview

Note: As always, what’s shared here is being actively pursued, but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 6.8.

WordPress 6.8 is set to be released on April 15th, 2025. This release continues refining foundational features introduced in previous versions, focusing on improving data views, query loops, and block interactions. It introduces a more streamlined design experience with a Zoom Out editing approach, expanded style controls, and enhanced typography options. API developments, including the Block Hooks and Interactivity API, aim to enhance extensibility, while speculative loading integration and performance optimizations seek to improve site speed. Accessibility improvements and ongoing support for PHP 8.x ensure WordPress remains user-friendly and forward-compatible.

Of note, this release includes Gutenberg 19.4 – 20.4.

Important links:

Roadmap 6.8.
WordPress 6.8 Development Cycle
6.8 Field Guide (will come out around March 25 after RC 1 release)
What’s new for developers: November, December, January, February

6.8 assets:

In this Google Drive folder you can view all assets in this document

Priority items for 6.8

Global Styles available on the main site editor sidebar

[theme author] [site admin]

The Site Editor sidebar is getting increasingly powerful, serving as the entry point to manage all things on your site. Until this version, the Styles panel offered limited style settings, focusing on style variations, color palettes, and typographies. WordPress 6.8 changes this by introducing a full-fledged Global Styles panel in its place, giving users site-wide granular control of styles at the top level.

Swifter hiding and showing the template

[theme author][site admin]

Switching between editing your site templates and content pages should be as smooth and seamless as possible; sometimes, you need to focus on the post content and hide the rest of the template. This was previously possible in the post settings, but now it is much easier thanks to the Show template toggle directly on the preview dropdown in the top toolbar.

Style Book

[theme author][site admin]

The Style Book provides a comprehensive overview of your site’s colors, typography, and block styles in an organized layout. Each block example and style group is labeled, making it easy to preview and understand your theme’s current design settings.

Think of it as if your theme threw a party, and all the design elements showed up wearing name tags.

Ramon Dodd, release lead of Gutenberg 19.9

The Style Book can be accessed in two ways. The first option is via the Styles menu item in the left sidebar. The second option is available when editing theme elements via the right Styles sidebar. This was already available in WordPress 6.7.

With WordPress 6.8, opening the Style Book from the left sidebar Styles menu shows subsets of blocks and makes them available for site wide editing.

When you click on Typography you can preview all text-related blocks, and adjust options and settings. You can preview and modify specific blocks via the Blocks option.

The Style Book also received some performance improvements to ensure a more fluid user experience.

Give the Style Book its own route so it can be linked to directly (67811).
Scroll to top at the styles root (67605).
Try splitting the Style Book into sections (68071).

For classic themes that support the Style Book, site patterns have been relocated to Appearance > Design > Patterns, consolidating all design-related functionality from the Site Editor into one place. Previously, patterns were listed under Appearance > Patterns.

Support is available for classic themes that either support editor styles via add_theme_support( ‘editor-styles’ ) or have a theme.json file (66851).

Zoom Out View

[theme author][site admin][end user]

In Zoom Out view, users can now apply different section styles and designs directly from the toolbar, cycling through them and inspecting them in the context of the rest of the page. This enhancement streamlines the decision-making and production process (67140).

The Block options on the block toolbar only lists Copy, Cut, Duplicate, and Delete for sections in Zoom Out view (67279).

In addition to the added Zoom Out icon in the toolbar, users can also invoke Zoom Out view via the Keyboard shortcut Shift command + 0 on a Mac and Shift + Ctrl + 0 on Windows (66400). The shortcut has also been added to the Keyboard shortcuts list.

Design Tools

[end user][theme author] [site admin]

Design Tools offers increasingly refined tools for visual customization. When it comes to border and spacing support, the block editor itself provides granular controls within individual blocks, allowing users to define border widths, styles, colors, and radii, as well as precise padding and margin adjustments. These controls facilitate the creation of visually distinct elements and well-structured layouts. The work for WordPress 6.6 and 6.7 was continued for WordPress 6.8 to provide all design tools to all blocks, where possible.

In this release, the following blocks received border support

Comments (66354),
Comments Link (68450),
Comments Count (68223),
Latest Posts (66353),
Page List, also received color and spacing support (66385),
Content, also spacing support (66366),
RSS, also spacing support (66411),
Archives, also color support (63400), (68685), and
Query Total (68323)

Beyond those, the Category block supports color options as well (68686).

For the Post Content block, the color support via the sidebar Design Tools has been brought up to feature parity with the options available via theme.json. Now users and designers can adjust colors for all heading levels in addition to text, background, and link (67783).

Another user experience improvement can be found in the list of fonts: Each font family is now previewed in the font picker dropdown and gives users a better indication as to what the font will look like (67118).

The Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 6.8 edition) gives you a complete overview of the available Design Tools per core block.

Updated Core Blocks

Buttons

[theme author][developer]

WordPress 6.8 adds a small piece of code (`box-sizing: border-box;`) to the styling of buttons. Imagine you’re putting a picture in a frame. You want the picture to fit nicely within the frame’s borders. That’s what `box-sizing: border-box;` does for buttons (and other elements) on a website. It tells the browser to include the border and padding of an element in its total width and height (65716)

Cover Block

[theme author][site admin][end user]

Images used as backgrounds in Cover blocks now come with resolution controls so that you can change their sizes. This works with both an uploaded background image or the already assigned featured image. This adds to the more granular control for designers and theme developers. (#67273), (62926).

Details block

[theme author][site admin][developer][end user]

In WordPress 6.8 the Details block is now more flexible to use and has received some quality-of-life updates:

The addition of the name attributes field in the Advanced panel of the block’s settings. This allows a group of Details blocks to be connected and styled if needed. (56971)

The summary content is used as the label in the List View which makes it quicker to identify the block and allows for easier reorganizing of content (67217).

The Details block also receives anchor support via the Advanced panel, allowing users to create anchor links to specific Details blocks.

With the help of the allowedBlocks attributes, developers can now control what blocks content creators can use in a Details block. (68489).

File block

[end user][site admin]

Allow content-only editing, which gives users the ability to update the filename text and download button text (65787).

Gallery Block

[end user][site admin]

Each image in a Gallery block shows multiple options on how a link should behave and how a visitor to the site can interact with the images. For WordPress 6.8 contributors added Expand to click to the Gallery’s toolbar to open all images in a light box effect, with one click. The option is available from the Link toolbar button (64014).

Image Blocks and handling

[end user][site admin]

The outcome of the Image manipulation methods are now better communicated in the block editor. The success notices are displayed at the bottom of the editor. The notices also come with a handy Undo link to revert to the original if necessary (67314, 67312).

Set image blocks as featured image

[theme author][site admin][end user]

Featured images offer a nice touch in external previews, making them more attractive to potential readers. However, it can be easy to forget to set one! To help set featured images more easily, Image blocks now offer a dropdown action to directly set them as the featured image of the post or page containing the block (65896).

Another WordPress 6.8 update also changes how the Image block handles those cool overlay styles aka filters (like a semi-transparent color wash) designers might add on top of images. It’s making the way these styles are applied more efficient and reliable. Details on CSS changes can be found in the PR (67788).

Navigation Block

[end user][site admin][theme author]

The theme of polish also continues for the Navigation Block. Menu names are now displayed in the List View for easier orientation and, for faster design considerations, a Clear option was added to the color picker(68446)(68454).

These updates enabled non-interactive formats for the block, and users can now use the choices from the dropdown menu in the block’s tools bar, like Highlight, Strikethrough, or Inline image (67585).

Query Loop Block

[site admin][theme author][end user]

The Query Loop block received an additional filtering option named Formats, making it possible to create templates or post lists for the various post formats available in WordPress: Image, Video, Aside, Link, Standard, and Gallery. Caveat: the used Theme needs to register support for post formats (66037)

For Pages, content creators will find two additional sorting options: Ascending by order and Descending by order, which allows for a display following the page attribute page_order (68781).

Video: https://videopress.com/v/CN22ETfh

Looking to replace your Query Loop block’s design? The Query Loop block patterns have been relocated from a modal to a dropdown. It’s still in the block toolbar, now under Change design (66993).

The Query Loop block now has a new option to ignore sticky posts. When selected, the Query Loop block ignores whether a post has the sticky option enabled. When used, all posts show based on the ORDER BY preferences selected without taking the sticky status into account. (66221) (69057)

Introducing the Query Total block

[theme author][site admin][end user]

You know how many results are in your queries, but do your site’s readers? The new Query Total block is here to help.When added to a Query Loop block, the Query Total block displays the number of results the query has returned, or, alternatively, the current range in a set of paginated results. Out of the box, the new block shows its border controls (68150)(68323) (68507).

Separator Block

[theme author][developer][site admin]

Now designers and creators can choose between a <div> or <hr> tag, opening up more styling possibilities for this block. The setting to switch can be found under Advanced > HTML Element. The transformation option now also includes the Spacer block. (67530) (66230)

Social Icons block updates

[end user][site admin]

The social icons block shipped with the option to add a Discord icon, received a Clear button to reset color options, and received contentOnly support. To add a URL to the icons, you now only need to press the arrow key once. This certainly streamlines the content creation process. (64883) (68564) (66622)

Editor improvements

[end user][site admin][theme author]

The Editor screens received a few helpful improvements in WordPress 6.8.

Reset

Reset colors for blocks and global styles in the editor with a single click thanks to the inline reset button added to all color controls (#67116). The Shadow panel and the Duotone settings also received a very handy reset button. Instead of the need to remove settings one at a time, designers can quickly start over. (66722) (68981)

Cut

The Block Options menu now also lists a Cut action together with the Copy action in the dropdown menu. (68554)

New Commands

Two new commands were added to the Command Palette in the Site editor:

The Add new page command creates a new page from anywhere in the site editor and speeds up the content creation process (65476).
The Open Site Editor command offers a one click navigation to the site editor, from the page or post editor screens accessed via the WP-Admin menu (66722).

Starter Content

With WordPress 6.8, a new pattern category is available, called Starter Content. It lists the page layouts that are otherwise available via the New Page modal. If a user has disabled the starter content pop-up when creating new pages, this category surfaces the page layouts, should they be needed. (66819) The Inserter now also always shows all the available patterns in a list. (65611).

Patterns in folders

[theme author][site admin] [developer]

With WordPress 6.8 developer can now use sub-folders to organize patterns for their themes. For example, all header patterns are added to the “header” folder, all footer patterns into the “footer” folder, testimonials patterns into the “testimonials” folder, and so on. (62378)

Data Views updates

This release also contains quite a few Data Views improvements:

A user can modify the amount of whitespace that is displayed per row on three levels: comfortable, balanced, and compact. (67170)

You can now set your site’s homepage from the Site Editor via the page’s actions menu (#65426). This is the equivalent of updating the Reading Settings in Settings > Reading. Under Pages in the editor, find the page you’d like to set as your homepage, click on the action menu, and select Set as homepage.

All delete actions now show a Confirm to delete modal, to safeguard against accidental removal of templates, patterns, or pages. (67824)

Here is a list of PRs with more Data View changes:

Add: Media field changing UI to Data views and content preview field to posts and pages. (67278)
Add combined fields support. (65399)
DataViews Fields API: Default getValueFromId supports nested objects. (66890)
DataViews list layout: Hide actions menu when there is only one action and is primary. (67015)
DataViews table layout: Hide actions menu when there is only one action and is primary. (67020)
DataViews: Expand configuration dropdown on mobile. (67715)
DataViews configuration dropdown: Remove style overrides. (65373)
Update “hidden” icon to be clearer, and invert logic as used in DataViews. (65914)

API iterations

[developer][plugin author][enterprise]

Interactivity API

The Interactivity API in WordPress 6.8 introduces an improved wp-each directive, making it more flexible and reliable. Previously, it could only loop through arrays or objects with a .map method. Now, it supports any iterable value, including strings, arrays, maps, sets, and generator functions. Additionally, it can handle undefined or null values by subscribing to changes and updating automatically when the value becomes iterable.(67798)

Block Hooks API

In WordPress 6.8, work continues on improvements to the Block Hooks API.

The Block Hooks API now supports dynamically inserting blocks into post content. (67272) A typical example would be a plugin that provides blocks that can be used in posts and that would like to provide extensibility for those blocks. The Block Hooks API will now also work with Synced Patterns. (68058)

Security enhancements

Various security-related enhancements made it into WordPress 6.8, the most significant of which is the switch to using bcrypt for password hashing. This includes improvements to the algorithm that’s used for storing application passwords and security keys. The dedicated post WordPress 6.8 will use bcrypt for password hashing covers these changes in detail. You will find a list of all security updates in 6.8 on WordPress Core Trac.

Support for Speculative Loading

Building upon the success of the Speculative Loading plugin, which has over 40,000 active installations, WordPress 6.8 integrates speculative loading into core. This feature utilizes the Speculation Rules API to prefetch URLs dynamically based on user interaction, aiming to improve performance metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). The current proposal has a default configuration employing conservative prefetching to ensure safety and compatibility, but feedback is requested on this. Developers have access to filters for customization, allowing adjustments to the speculative loading behavior as needed (#62503). Details are laid out in the Speculative Loading in 6.8 Dev Note.

Additional Performance improvements

For the WordPress 6.8 release, several key performance improvements have been implemented in the block editor and collectively contribute to a more responsive and efficient editing experience.

To address performance issues in the site editor when handling navigation blocks with multiple submenu. The isBlockVisibleInTheInserter selector was improved to prevent unnecessary computations, resulting in a more efficient block editor experience (#68898).
This release also introduces the withSyncEvent action wrapper utility to streamline event handling, reducing potential performance bottlenecks (#68097). A Dev Note is in the works.

Accessibility improvements

WordPress 6.8 includes 26 accessibility improvements. A Dev Note with more details will be in the Field Guide around the Release candidate release on March 25.

The post Gutenberg Times: Source of Truth (WordPress 6.8) appeared first on MCNM Digital Media Marketing.