Sarah Gooding
Work on WordPress 6.4 is kicking off with a post from Editor Triage Co-Lead Anne McCarthy that highlights everything the team has planned for the release. This will be the third major release of 2023, and is unique in that it’s being led by an underrepresented gender release squad.
Although WordPress is moving into Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which focuses on collaboration, 6.4 will primarily extend existing features in the block and site editors.
“Initial explorations for phase 3 will continue in the Gutenberg plugin, and any early wins will be added alongside the foundational work already planned in this major release,” McCarthy said.
WordPress 6.4 is anticipated to introduce typography management features, including a Font Library and server-side @font-face CSS generation and printing. This means users will be able to browse a library of fonts in the admin, similar to how they manage media. It will not be dependent on the theme that is activated but will be a library that is extensible for plugin developers.
Other new functionality planned for 6.4 includes the following:
WordPress 6.4 will also ship with a new Twenty Twenty-Four default theme that will showcase the latest capabilities of block themes.
McCarthy emphasized that the features published in the roadmap are “being actively pursued” but may not represent what actually lands in the final release.
WordPress 6.4 is anticipated to be released on November 7, 2023, with Beta 1 expected on September 26.
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Scrolling marquee doesn’t seem a great idea to be in core. But whatever!
I see some paid features from the theme i use (kadence) are now going to be available for free.
Post formats? That doesn’t seem to fit our new block based world.
I definitely recommend digging into the GitHub issue on this to learn more about why it matters and how it might work within things like the Query loop block: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/53049
Very excited about the TTR (Time to Read) and ToC (Table of Content) – right now, I’m using a block-plugin just to get that one feature. Looks like I can remove it soon 😀
Same!
any mockup of the 2024 theme?
Live today! https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/08/24/introducing-twenty-twenty-four/
Where is the fix for shortcodes in templates?
Surprised to see a Scrolling Marquee block going in core. Of all the things the team could be spending time on, and that’s what they choose? Not only is it a very niche use case, but the very use of scrolling text is questionable from a usability standpoint. Should WordPress be encouraging it by supporting it in core? I don’t think so.
This is laughable, it’s appears to be driven by the short term design needs of A8 for wordpress.com. WordPress 6.4 could be tackling things that would make the web a better place e.g. a relationships api, finishing the taxonomy migration, a post status api, the notifications api, even the collaboration phase of Gutenberg. There are 10s of Trac items that have sat idle for years that are an order of magnitude more important than this list
The scrolling marque block joins the list of Gutenberg dubious features together with the verse block and duotone filters.
Completely agree with you. Moreover some more important features (SMTP in core anyone? Multi language support in core?) seem to be always in queue but never done. Why?
Agree with the other comments re the scrolling marquee block, it just seems bizarre.
There have many requests and suggestions for text indent option in the paragraph block, going all the way back to the early days of Gutenberg, and yet somehow a scrolling marquee is put on the 6.4 roadmap.
Scrolling marquee is an important, because everything else is static. Naturally the print biased crowd will howl to the sky about anything that is animated or dynamic, but will slowly adjust to fluid design elements – we shouldn’t leave entirety of modern design to plugins like Elementor.
To the ‘print biased crowd’ please add many people with dyslexia, many with ADHD and many autistic people, all of whom can find continuous movement on web pages hard to deal with.
Also let’s hope that the devs who build this functionality consult user preferences with the prefers-reduced-motion media query, and honour it.
Go with the flow, textual instability is the new norm, helping to exercise the motor muscles of the eyes, bringing attention to gestalt patterns of design, rather than a specialized focus on specific words. An experience which benefits these groups.
Thankfully, you are not part of the WP accessibility team.
Who’s this Scrolling Marquee block for?? Surely not 80% of WordPress users, as mandated by WordPress’ own philosophy!? More wasted time spent on another useless feature that could’ve been better spent on fixing some of the other 5K outstanding issues.
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