The release candidates for WordPress 6.8 are approaching and all the documentation about what this version will finally include is here.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from March 17th to 23rd, 2025.
The latest beta version of WordPress 6.8 is available while we wait for the release candidates to start coming out, which should begin by April 8.
What will WordPress 6.8 incorporate? Let’s review each of the new features:
The global styles are in the main sidebar of the Site Editor
The limited styles panel is replaced by a full one that allows granular, site-wide control over style variations, color palettes, and typography. This gives users a broader ability to customize the overall appearance of the site in WordPress 6.8.
The templates improve their show/hide functionality in a more agile way
It is now easier to toggle between editing templates and content. With the new “Show Template” switch in the dropdown menu of the top bar, it becomes easier to focus on the content by being able to hide the template structure.
The Style Book offers an organized view of colors, typography, and block styles, allowing one to preview and adjust the theme elements. In WordPress 6.8, its access is improved from the left sidebar for global editing and the patterns in classic themes have been relocated to Appearance -> Design -> Patterns, integrating all the design functionality.
The Zoom Out view allows one to apply and explore different section styles directly from the toolbar, showing the full page context. In addition, quick access is included through keyboard shortcuts and the block options menu is simplified to only four actions.
The design tools have been expanded, offering more precise controls for borders, spacing, and colors in different blocks. WordPress 6.8 incorporates improvements in blocks such as Comments, Page, RSS, among others, allowing detailed adjustments that enrich the visual customization of the content.
Regarding the blocks included in the core editor, there are also some new features:
The Buttons now have the property box-sizing: border-box; added to their style. This ensures that the total width and height include borders and padding, ensuring that the button fits correctly in its visual “frame.”
The background images in the Cover blocks now include resolution controls, which allow modifying their size for both uploaded images and featured images, offering greater control for designers and developers.
The Details block is now more flexible and easier to use. A field for name attributes has been added in the Advanced panel, which allows connecting and styling groups of Details blocks. In addition, the summary content is used as a label in list view, making its identification and reordering easier, and anchor support for direct links has been added. Developers can control the allowed blocks within it using the attribute allowedBlocks.
The Files block allows content-only editing, offering the possibility to update directly the file name text and the download button text.
Each image in the Gallery now shows multiple options for link behavior. The “Expand” option has been added in the toolbar to open all images in a lightbox effect with a single click.
The methods for manipulating images now show success notifications at the bottom of the editor, accompanied by an undo link. In addition, an option has been incorporated in the block menu to set the image as the featured image and the overlay (filter) styles have been optimized for more efficient application.
The experience of the Navigation block has been refined: now the menu names are shown in list view to facilitate orientation and a “Clear” option has been added in the color picker. Non-interactive formats and additional options from the dropdown menu of the toolbar have also been enabled.
A “Formats” filter has been added to create lists or templates based on the different post formats (image, video, etc.) of the Query Loop. For pages, options for ascending and descending order according to the page_order attribute have been added. In addition, the patterns of the Query Loop have been moved to a dropdown menu and an option to ignore sticky posts has been introduced.
The new block, Query Total, designed to be used alongside the Query Loop, shows the total number of results or the current range in paginated results, including border controls for its customization.
Designers can choose between a <div> element or an <hr> for the Separator, which expands the styling possibilities. The option is found in Advanced > HTML Element, and the transformation now also includes the Spacer block.
The Discord icon has been incorporated among the Social Icons and a “Clear” button has been added to reset the color options. In addition, support for content-only editing has been implemented, simplifying the insertion of URLs with a single press of the arrow key.
And in general, as improvements of the editor, we have some like the following:
An inline Reset button has been incorporated to reset block colors and global styles with one click. In addition, the shadow and duotone panels have their own reset button, which allows designers to start over without having to remove each individual setting.
In the block options menu, the Cut action has been added alongside the Copy option, facilitating the reorganization and editing of content directly from the editor.
Two commands have been added to the Command Palette:
- “Add New Page” to create pages from anywhere in the editor and speed up the content creation process.
- “Open Site Editor”, which allows immediate navigation to the site editor from the editing screens of posts or pages.
A new pattern category called Starter Content is introduced, which groups the page designs available in the New Page modal. This allows access to these designs even if the user has disabled the initial content pop-up. In addition, the inserter always shows the complete list of available patterns.
Developers can now organize patterns into subfolders according to their function (for example, “header”, “footer”, “testimonials”, etc.), making it easier to manage and organize them within the theme.
Several improvements have been implemented in Data Views:
- Users can adjust the space between rows in three levels (comfortable, balanced, and compact).
- It is possible to configure the site’s homepage directly from the Site Editor, similar to the option in Settings -> Reading.
- All deletion actions now show a confirmation modal to avoid accidental deletions.
- Additional improvements have been introduced in the interface and functionality of fields, action menus, and settings in list and table views.
The Interactivity API improves the wp-each directive, making it more flexible and reliable. It now accepts any iterable value (strings, arrays, maps, sets, generator functions) and even handles null or undefined values, automatically updating when the value becomes iterable.
Work continues on the Block Hooks API to allow the dynamic insertion of blocks into the content of posts, which facilitates block extensibility even in synchronized patterns.
Among the most important updates is the change to using bcrypt for password hashing. This affects both user passwords, security keys, and application passwords, reinforcing the protection of the platform.
Integrated into the WordPress core, the speculative loading uses the Speculation Rules API to dynamically preload URLs based on user interaction. This improves performance metrics such as the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and allows developers to adjust its behavior through filters.
Optimizations have been applied in the block editor and the site editor to improve responsiveness. Among these improvements are:
- Optimization of the selector isBlockVisibleInTheInserter to better handle navigation menus with multiple submenus.
- Introduction of the utility withSyncEvent to streamline event handling and avoid bottlenecks.
WordPress 6.8 includes 26 accessibility improvements, reinforcing the user experience for people with diverse needs. A development note will be published in the Field Guide to detail these improvements starting from the release candidate.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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