Yes, today, the 25th of January 2022 is the release day for the latest version of WordPress. We understand that not everyone follows the Make WordPress blog so we decided to provide you with a brief overview of what’s new in 5.9.

If you haven’t seen this video yet, this video provides great visual highlights of the new features.

Full Site Editing

The biggest change in this version of WordPress is the support for full site editing. Full site editing is exactly what it sounds like, you can now use the block editor, affectionately known as Gutenberg, to edit your entire site. This means that you can now use all the editing tools/blocks that were available in the post and page editor to edit your entire site, from the header down to the footer, including site navigation.

How does it work?

You can only make use of full site editing with new themes that support it, known as block themes. These new themes support pre-made designs, called patterns, making it easy to effortlessly change layouts for your content. Each theme now also has new styling options, making it easy for you to change the look and feel of your entire site without changing the theme. 

Block Themes

A block theme is a theme that uses blocks for all parts of a site, including navigation menus, header, content, and site footer. 

You can find new block themes on the WordPress theme directory using the Full Site Editing tag. 

A new Navigation Block

The new navigation block replaces the legacy navigation builder within wp-admin. You can now easily add a new navigation block by clicking on the ‘add block’ button and selecting the Navigation block. You can also type “/navigation” and hit enter in a new paragraph block to add one quickly.

Patterns

Patterns are design or layout templates, which can easily be applied to your own site with a simple copy/paste. Find patterns for your header, footer, buttons, text, images, anything really!

There is an all new pattern directory on WordPress.org with an ever growing collection of patterns for you to choose from.

Styling Options

New block themes come with extensive styling options referred to as Styles. Styles allow you to customise your site any way you’d like from different colours to unique typography, making it possible to easily change the entire look and feel of your site while maintaining the same theme.

All the other goodness

WordPress 5.9 also includes many performance improvements and bug fixes with many other improvements to API’s and WordPress Core. We’ll let those of you interested in that read more at your own leisure.

Looking to learn more?

If all these changes are overwhelming, the good news is that you can now take free courses on WordPress.org to Learn WordPress. Here is a free course for Simple Site Design with Full Site Editing for those specifically interested in full site editing. Happy learning!