More than 700 contributors to WordPress 6.5, with over 2,500 changes, have enabled the release of the latest version: WordPress 6.5, aka Regina.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Pódcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this program, you’ll find the information from April 1st to 7th, 2024.
With a week’s delay from the original release date, WordPress 6.5, nicknamed “Regina”, arrives, inspired by violinist Regina Carter, an award-winning jazz artist and educator. Regina’s technical foundations in classical music and her deep understanding of jazz have earned her a reputation for boldly going beyond what’s possible with the violin.
And this is what this new version reflects, going further with a single instrument: WordPress.
The new version, WordPress 6.5, introduces several significant features and improvements such as the Font Library that facilitates the management of fonts without the need for code; more detailed revisions for templates and template parts; enhanced tools for backgrounds and shadows in blocks; new data views to organize and quickly access site information; improvements in drag-and-drop functionality; and more intuitive link controls.
For developers, the Interactivity API and the Block Bindings API are highlighted, expanding the possibilities for creating interactive experiences and connecting blocks with dynamic content.
More than 110 performance updates have been made, resulting in a faster and more efficient experience, and more than 65 accessibility improvements have been included to make WordPress more inclusive, thanks to over 700 contributors and 2,500 enhancements.
The Performance team has opened a discussion on the importance of field research to understand the real-world use of WordPress sites, focusing on the collection and analysis of performance data.
A collaborative tutorial and reference guide has been presented for those unfamiliar with BigQuery, HTTP Archive, and Chrome User Experience Report, so this resource can help WordPress developers, regardless of their experience level with these technologies, to collect and analyze performance data.
On the Developer Blog, an entry has been published about how to register a collection of fonts for the Font Library, and an introduction to Playground, the tool that allows launching a WordPress in the browser.
The CLI team returns once again with a WP-CLI Hack Day on April 26, 2024, with the goal of closing at least 20 tickets during the event.
The Hosting team has published the entry on compatibility between WordPress 6.5 and PHP. Besides documenting the minimum requirements, warning messages for possible known compatibility errors with PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 have been defined.
The final recommendation for new installations is: WordPress 6.5, PHP 8.2, and MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11.
The Accessibility team is already preparing some improvements for WordPress 6.6 related to Gutenberg, such as tracking the expanded view to add more tasks and individual items; the forms in DataViews to unify the different forms created as inspection panels or detail pages; the site editor index views; or the accessibility audit of data views, gathering feedback from 6.5 and focusing the next steps for version 6.6.
The Documentation team has begun the first steps to prepare the project for the localization of the documentation, which will be done in Spanish from Spain, preparing the initial team, meetings, and definition of prioritization of HelpHub articles.
The Polyglots team has included a small tool for translation reviewers indicating whether the translated text has been made with artificial intelligence and has not been reviewed or modified to adhere to style guides.
This is also expanded with a new option for reviewers, when responding, informing about poor quality due to automatic translation by artificial intelligence.
The Meta team has presented an update to the main page of WordPress.org focused on new and returning users of the platform, with information on the latest versions and including better information on events and how to learn about WordPress.
The Training team is working on thumbnails for the Learn WordPress redesign. Thumbnail templates have been created for use across multiple types of media, specifically for featured images of courses and lessons, YouTube video thumbnails, and online workshop thumbnails on Meetup.
The Community team will request adding a new menu called Events on all WordPress.org sites pointing to the site launched a few months ago that includes all official WordPress events.
They will also work on redefining the audience of the site to optimize the user experience, such as the filters to apply in the search for events.
The BuddyPress team has released the maintenance version 12.4, launched before WordPress 6.5, and the need to remove the last activity repair tool because it has become obsolete.
About the future version BuddyPress 14.0, it will focus on improvements such as integrating directory pages as subpages, Site Notifications as a core feature, and highlighting how to use the Block Editor for activities, exporting and importing data, disabling registration workflows, and improving the group moderator role.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.
Follow the content in Catalan, German, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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