WordPress 5.7 Release: What is expected?

WordPress 5.7 is going to be released on March 9. This is the first major WordPress release of 2021, mainly focusing on improvements of the core features and the Gutenberg editor. Keep reading to know how WordPress 5.7 is upgraded in comparison with the previous versions and what is expected in WordPress 5.7. WordPress is constantly upgraded! Stay up to date with the latest WordPress news and releases to keep your eCommerce site secured.

WordPress 5.7 New Features

The focused goal for WordPress in 2021 is Full Site Editing using Gutenberg. WordPress 5.7 will be the first step in that direction. Here are the main upgrades in this release:

• Update WordPress Core to include current releases of the Gutenberg plugin
• Gutenberg: ship additional blocks, refine the UI, add tools for themes and design, and continue working on the widget screen
• Continue work on auto-updates and jQuery

We may see some features added before the official release, but below are what have been added in WordPress 5.7 and are available for use in the beta:

Core Improvements

1. Lazy-load iframes

WordPress 5.7 will automatically add lazy load to iframe embeds which is a technique used to boost website speed during a page load. It basically tells the user’s browser to load an item when it is viewed.WordPress already uses lazy loading images by default since WordPress 5.5.

Now, you can extend it to iframes by adding the loading=”lazy” attribute to iframe tags on the front-end. So all embeds using iframes will use lazy loading to improve your page load speeds.

2. Streamlined migration from HTTP to HTTPS

Previously when you want to WordPress from HTTP to HTTPS, you need to manually update URLs embedded in your content. In this release, the WordPress 5.7 version will make it easier to migrate your website to HTTPs. It will show the availability of HTTPS in the Site Health menu as a critical issue. The site health feature will give a notice if the site is detected as being HTTP and not HTTPS.

WordPress can now detect if a user’s hosting environment supports HTTPS and enables a one-click update process, handling mixed content rewrites where possible.

So users will be able to click on a button to update the WordPress URLs. This will switch your WordPress and Site URL settings, and update URLs in your content to use HTTPs.

3. Standardize colors used in WP-Admin CSS to a single palette

Previously, WordPress offers a limited set of color schemes. Also, adding new color schemes is not easy since developers need to handle the Sass variable-based system.

WordPress 5.7 will now standardize the WP-admin color palette by applying a CSS custom properties system, which will make it easier to add custom color schemes.

In detail, WordPress 5.7 new release will collapse all colors used in the CSS to one of the available shades of colors like red, yellow, blue, green, grey, black, and white. This will provide you with a much wider range of light and dark color schemes.

4. Ongoing cleanup after update to jQuery 3.5.1

WordPress 5.7 core is making the jump from jQuery 1.12.4 to jQuery 3.5.1 for a lot of awesome upgrades such as modern features, better DX, and security improvements.

Previously, the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin could be used for reverting jQuery Migrate to an earlier version for plugins and themes using it. When WordPress 5.7 is released the plugin should still work but no new jQuery fixes will be pushed into the plugin. Active plugins on sites should have been updated to work with WordPress 5.7 and the jQuery Migrate changes but some might still not be updated.

5. New Robots API

The robots meta tag helps you manage search indexing by telling search engine bots how to crawl and index a website. This can be achieved by adding a robots.txt file to your site’s root folder or by using the robots meta tag.

WordPress 5.7 comes with a new filter-based Robots API that offers more control over the management of the robots meta tag. This new API allows developers to centrally manage the content of the robots meta tag that is injected into the page. Besides, it includes a setting to switch if search engines are allowed to display large media from the site.

By default, a max-image-preview:large robots directive will be injected into the robots meta tag based on the new setting.

Editor Improvements

1. Inserter drag and drop

In WordPress 5.7, you can easily drag and drop a block or pattern directly from the inserter into your content area. This way you can choose where to place a block before you drop it on the post canvas.

2. Full height alignment

In WordPress 5.7, you can create full-height blocks to fill in the height of the user’s screen and make the layout more visually stunning. You now can have an option to expand to fill the entire viewport.

3. Block Variations

In WordPress 5.7, block variations will include their own descriptions. The icon and description of a block variation are now displayed in the block inspector. Also, there will be a new dropdown in the block inspector that allows you to switch between block variations.

For example, you can add Facebook, Twitter, and other social icons into the social icons block, then, see them in the block inspector with a preview as below.

4. Buttons block

With the new WordPress release, there will be a vertical alignment for buttons in the block editor. Therefore, you can be able to select the width of a button from a preset percentage.

5. Social Icons block

Another improvement in the block editor in WordPress 5.7 is that you can change the size of icons in the social media icons block within 4 options namely Small, Normal, Large, and Huge.

6. Font size in more places

WordPress 5.7 allows you to adjust the font size in the List and Code blocks.

Test WordPress 5.7

Before updating your website to WordPress 5.7, you should create a staging site or testing it at a local setup.

You can test the WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 in two ways:

The first way to test the beta version is by using a tester plugin. All you need to do is installing and activating the WordPress Beta Tester Plugin.

After that, go to your WordPress dashboard > Tools > Beta Testing > Bleeding edge, and click Save Changes to save what you have done.

After that, you can update WordPress to the latest beta version.

The second method is that you can directly download the WordPress beta version here.

WordPress 5.7 Development Schedule

The WordPress 5.7 release schedule will be the same with that of WordPress 5.6:

• Alpha: 78 days – 5.6 had 84 days
• Beta: 21 days – same as 5.6
• Release Candidate: 14 days – same as 5.6

The WordPress team has worked on WordPress 5.7 for several months and the official version will be released on March 9, 2021. The detailed process is mentioned below:

• Alpha: November 17, 2020 – trunk is open for 5.7 alpha contributions
• Kickoff: December 15, 2020 – first bug scrub of the new cycle
• Planning Roundup: December 21, 2020
• Betas: February 2, 2021 – 11 weeks from branching off the Alpha version, seven weeks from kickoff
• Release Candidates: February 23, 2021 – three weeks from beta 1
• General Release: March 9, 2021 – two weeks from the release candidates

Save this schedule to keep up with all WordPress 5.7 updates and stay tuned for the official releases.

Wrapping up

Above are the latest features of WordPress 5.7. Once the WordPress 5.7 is launched, we will immediately update our WooCommerce theme to make it compatible with the latest version. So that you do not worry about any compatibility issues occurring among them when using Woostify theme.