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WordPress 5.4 – Building more with blocks, faster and easier.

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As they say, Say hello to more and better.

More ways to make your pages come alive. With easier ways to get it all done and looking better than ever – and boosts in speed you can feel.

WordPress keeps evolving and becoming better and better and so we welcome you to WordPress 5.4.

With every major release, they add more to the block editor, more ways to make posts and pages come alive with your best images. Brining more ways to bring more customers to your website, keep those customers engaged with the richness of embedded media from the web’s top services.

In a nutshell, it helps you bring your vision real in the most simplistic way possible and puts blocks in the perfect place. The latest update brings increased speeds everywhere. For example, as you build sections or galleries or even just type in a line your prose, you can feel how much swifter the workflows enabling you to build much much quicker.

Okay great, you want to know what’s new right? Okay, let’s go!

Two new blocks. And better blocks overall

  • Two brand new blocks: Social Icons and Buttons make adding interactive features fast and easy.
  • New ways with colour: gradients in the Buttons and Cover block, toolbar access to colour options in Rich Text blocks, and for the first time, colour options in the Group and Columns blocks.
  • Guess a whole lot less! Version 5.4 streamlines the whole process for placing and replacing multimedia in every block. Now it works the same way in almost every block!
  • And, if you’ve ever thought your image in the Media+Text block should link to something else – perhaps a picture of a brochure should download that brochure as a document? Well, now it can.

Cleaner UI, clearer navigation – and easier tabbing!

  • Clearer block navigation with block breadcrumbs. And easier selection once you get there.
  • For when you need to navigate with the keyboard, better tabbing and focus. Plus, you can tab over to the sidebar of nearly any block.
  • Speed! 14% faster loading of the editor, 51% faster time-to-type!
  • Tips are gone. In their place, a Welcome Guide window you can bring up when you need it – and only when you need it – again and again.
  • Know at a glance whether you’re in a block’s Edit or Navigation mode. Or, if you have restricted vision, your screen reader will tell you which mode you’re in.

Of course, if you want to work with the very latest tools and features, install the Gutenberg plugin. You’ll get to be the first to use new and exciting features in the block editor before anyone else has seen them!

Your fundamental right: privacy

5.4 helps with a variety of privacy issues around the world. So when users and stakeholders ask about regulatory compliance, or how your team handles user data, the answers should be a lot easier to get right.

Take a look below:

  • Now personal data exports include users session information and users location data from the community events widget. Plus, a table of contents!
  • See progress as you process to export and erasure requests through the privacy tools.
  • Plus, little enhancements throughout give the privacy tools a little cleaner look. Your eyes will thank you!

Wow, pretty cool huh?

But I’m pretty sure you want to see what this means for developers right? We have you covered.

Just for developers

Add custom fields to menu items – natively

  • Two new actions let you add custom fields to menu items – without a plugin and without writing custom walkers.
  • On the Menus admin screen, wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields fires just before the move buttons of a nav menu item in the menu editor.
  • In the Customiser,
    wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields_customize_template fires at the end of the menu-items form-fields template.
Blocks! Simpler styling, new APIs and embeds

  • Radically simpler block styling. Negative margins and default padding are gone! Now you can style blocks the way you need them. And, a refactor got rid of four redundant wrapper divs.
  • If you build plugins, now you can register collections of your blocks by namespace across categories – a great way to get more brand visibility.
  • Let users do more with two new APIs: block variations and gradients.
  • In embeds, now the block editor supports TikTok, and CollegeHumor is gone.

There’s lots more information for developers to love in WordPress 5.4. To discover more and learn how to make these changes shine on your sites, themes, plugins and more, check the WordPress 5.4 Field Guide.

To conclude

WordPress and their community are always trying their best to make their platform the best available on the market. What you have to appreciate is this is open-source software. The open-source software development model allows others to not only study the code but also improve it by testing, bug reporting and submitting patches.

It’s always recommended to keep the WordPress version and Plugins up-to-date, for many reasons (e.g. Security and Compatibility). To update, you can simply log in to your WordPress CMS and update through the dashboard. Alternatively, you can download the latest version here on the official WordPress website.

What do you love most about WordPress 5.4? Leave us a comment below with your thoughts!

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