What’s Coming in WordPress 5.9

WordPress 5.9 Beta was released a few days ago, and the final version is scheduled for January 25th, 2022. It will be the year’s first major release, with a slew of new features and enhancements.
We’ve been keeping a close eye on the progress and putting new features to the test on our test sites.
With features and screenshots, we’ll give you a sneak peak at what’s coming in WordPress 5.9.

Editing of the entire website

The site editing features released in WordPress 5.8 earlier this year will be expanded in WordPress 5.9.
The site editing experience will be greatly enhanced with this next update. These new features make it easy to customize your WordPress theme without having to know any code, allowing you to create a website with a truly distinctive look.

Full site modification, however, will be limited to themes that support this new capability.

Site-Wide Blocks are now available.

Under the ‘Theme’ category, WordPress 5.9 will introduce ten new blocks designed exclusively for complete site modification.

Here is a list of theme blocks introduced in 5.9:

• Navigation
• Template Part
• Header
• Footer
• Post Author
• Next Post
• Previous Post
• Post Comments
• Term Description
• Archive Title

Styles for the Entire Site

The option to develop new styles for your theme that will be used across your site is another significant feature of the site editor. When editing a post or page, simply click the Style icon in the top right corner of the screen.
You can alter your website’s typography and colors from here.

When you’re finished, you can save your modifications to individual templates, template portions, or your entire website as a global style.

Modify the Block Styles

You can also change the styles of individual blocks on your website using the site editor.
Simply select Blocks from the Style drop-down menu. You’ll see a list of editable and customizable blocks.

This enables you to apply different styles to different blocks on your website. You can, for example, modify the color of the buttons to fit your brand, adjust the font size of the headings, and so on.

Adding Navigation Menus in a Different Way

In WordPress 5.9, you may now change navigation menus in a new way.
First and foremost, the ‘Menu’ link has been renamed to Navigation Menus.
You can just add a navigation menu title here if you’re using a supported theme.
The new Navigation Menu block in the site editor can be used to alter and add items to the navigation menu.

You can quickly create navigation menus, add new links, change colors, spacing, orientation, and more with the new navigation menu block.

Twenty Twenty-Two is the new default theme.

WordPress 5.9 will launch with a fresh new default theme named Twenty Twenty-Two, as it will be the first major update of the coming year.
The new default theme makes advantage of all of the new site editor’s interesting features.

It is designed to be the most flexible default WordPress theme ever, providing users immense control over every aspect of design.

Twenty Twenty-Two features a bold yet minimalistic design using Source Serif Pro font for headings.

The theme also comes with a bunch of ready-made patterns that you can use in the site editor or the block editor when writing content.

While the full site editing features are exciting, they still depend on your WordPress theme.

If you need an easier and more flexible option, then you can try SeedProd. It allows you to easily create custom pages for your website regardless of which WordPress theme you are using.

Block Editor Improvements in WordPress 5.9

Most WordPress users spend the majority of their time writing content. That’s why each WordPress release comes with improvements and new features added to the block editor.

Effortlessly Move Sections

Users will now be able to move sections from the List View on the toolbar. Simply click on an item and move it up and down.

This allows you to easily jump to different parts of the content and move them around so you can quickly readjust your layout.

Navigation Block

The navigation block in the site editor can also be used inside your WordPress posts and pages as well. This allows you to manually create navigation menus in your articles or landing pages.

For instance, you can use it to create a table of contents with links to different areas of an article.

Better Social Icons and Buttons

With previous versions of WordPress, it was a bit difficult to access controls of the parent and child blocks when working with social icons and buttons.

WordPress 5.9 will make it easier by allowing child blocks to use the parent block’s toolbar.

Better Headings Controls

The headings block now allows you to select a heading level from a vertical dropdown menu. You also have more typography, design, margin, and spacing options for your headings.

Rich URL Previews in Block Editor

Previously, when you hovered your mouse over to a link in the post editor, you only saw the URL. WordPress 5.9 will now fetch and display rich URL previews for links inside post editor.

There are many other improvements to individual blocks in the block editor. All of them enhance user experience by offering more dimensions, spacing, typography, and other tools.

Choose Language During Login

If you have multiple languages installed on your WordPress website, then users will now be able to choose their preferred language on the login screen.

Under the Hood Changes

WordPress 5.9 will also bring many changes for developers to explore and use in their own themes, plugins, and projects.

Following are some of these under the hood changes:

• WordPress core PHP Test Suite will now support PHPUnit 8.x via PHPUnit Polyfills library
• New function wp_get_post_revisions_url() to get URL for a post revision.
• New wp_list_users() template tag will be introduced.

We hope this article gives you insights into the upcoming features of WordPress 5.9.

In the comments below let us know what features are interesting and what you would like to see in future versions of WordPress.