WordPress Update
Meet “Esperanza”, the first WordPress release of 2021. “Esperanza” is named in honor of Esperanza Spalding, a modern musical prodigy. Her path as a musician is varied and inspiring—learn more about her and give her music a listen!
With this new version, WordPress brings you fresh colours. The editor helps you work in a few places you couldn’t before without getting into code or hiring a pro. The controls you use most are right where you need them. Layout changes that should be simple, are even simpler to make.
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.
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.
This new streamlined colour palette collapses all the colours that used to be in the WordPress source code down to seven core colours and a range of 56 shades that meet the WCAG 2.0 AA recommended contrast ratio against white or black.
Find the new palette in the default WordPress Dashboard colour scheme, and use it when you’re building themes, plugins, or any other components. For all the details, check out the Color Palette dev note.
Starting now, switching a site from HTTP to HTTPS is a one-click move. WordPress will automatically update database URLs when you make the switch. No more hunting and guessing!
The new Robots API lets you include the filter directives in the robots meta tag, and the API includes the max-image-preview: large directive by default. That means search engines can show bigger image previews, which can boost your traffic (unless the site is marked not-public).
Now it’s simple to let iframes lazy-load. By default, WordPress will add a loading="lazy" attribute to iframe tags when both width and height are specified.
For years jQuery helped make things move on the screen in ways the basic tools couldn’t—but that keeps changing, and so does jQuery.
In 5.7, jQuery gets more focused and less intrusive, with fewer messages in the console.