What’s New in WordPress 5.8 – Full site editing

The official version of WordPress 5.8, which is planning to be released on July 20, 2021, is regarded as one of the biggest WordPress updates this year. This update will offer a variety of improvements and features.

So what can we expect from WordPress 5.8? Please keep reading to explore what makes WordPress 5.8 stand out compared with the previous versions. What’s more, our post also instructs you to test the WordPress 5.8 release. Let’s go!

WordPress 5.8 – new features of Full Editing Site

This update mainly focuses on introducing users to a new method for building the WordPress site that is called full site editing.

Full site editing allows you to use Gutenberg blocks to build all the elements for your WordPress pages and posts.

Let’s explore the FSE features that plan to be released in WordPress 5.8.

Template Editor

As a new exciting feature of the WordPress 5.8 full editing site, the template editor allows creating new post/page block templates and saving them for later use. It is regarded as a great method that makes WordPress site building much easier. Especially, it brings great convenience for those who are not using block-based themes.

When switching to the Template Editor, you can edit your post/page using available Gutenberg blocks, including Site Logo, Site Tagline, Site Title, Query Loop, Post Title, Post Content, Post Date, Post Excerpt, Post Featured Image, Post Categories, Post Tags, Login/out, and Page List. It’s likely that there will be more and more block updates in the next WordPress releases.

You can use the Template Editor feature combined with your WordPress themes. There won’t be any conflicts between them. WordPress 5.8 allows you to take advantage of Site Editing blocks for page design while maintaining your theme style. The combination of both is really a great thing for WordPress users.

By default, this new feature hasn’t been enabled yet. But when you want to use it, you can easily enable it in the Settings or using the shortcode below in the functions.php file

add_theme_support( 'block-templates' );

Gutenberg Block Updates

Each WordPress update brings about improvements to block editing, helping creating pages and posts . And WordPress 5.8 is not an exception. Following are the latest changes to the block editor. Let’s see!

Nested Blocks

When building WordPress posts or pages, sometimes you will find it necessary to use nested blocks, meaning blocks inside blocks. For example, you want to create a text block inside a Column block. Of course, the previous versions of WordPress allows creating this kind of layout. But it is a little bit difficult for you to select the main parent block.

But WordPress 5.8 will help a lot in controlling over parent blocks and nested blocks. With a permanent toolbar button, this feature makes it easy for users to select a parent block. The icon shown in the image below is the parent item.

Query Loop Block

Query Loop, also known as the page list block, is a quite new feature in WordPress. It will come to users in the release of WordPress 5.8.

With the Query Loop, you can create dynamic content, including post or page lists based on categories or tags, custom post types, post publishing time (recent posts), and so on. These lists will be updated continuously while you build the content for the website.

List View sidebar

The list view is where a list of blocks or sections used for the template will display. This feature will help navigate between blocks easily if you have a complex interface. Before WordPress 5.8, you will see the list view in a popover, but it will be closed once you click anywhere outside the popover.

In WordPress 5.8, there are several enhancements to this List View feature, bringing a new experience of block navigation. In particular, when switching to the List View panel, you will see the complete list of blocks in the sidebar. Then, it will be much easier for you to select and arrange them for your post, especially for advanced layouts.

As you can see in the image below, once you point the mouse at or click on a specific item in the List View sidebar, WordPress also automatically highlights the corresponding section in the current post/page.

Duotone Effect

WordPress 5.8 also introduces you to another exciting feature called Duotone filter. Duotone is the combination of “double” and “tone”. That means this feature helps create a new image using two contrasting colours, one for “shadows” (the dark) and one for “highlights” (the light).

This feature will be applied to media and images blocks. By default, WordPress will provide you with several presets, but you can combine any colours you like to have your own images.

WebP Format Support

WebP is a modern image format by Google that comes with superior quality and compression capabilities. With much smaller file sizes (25 to 34% smaller than JPEG and PNG images), WebP images help load the page much faster. For these outstanding points, this image format stands out compared to the common ones like JPG, JPEG, PNG, and GIF.

As a WordPress user, you surely know that the previous versions of WordPress don’t support the WebP format. When you try to upload a WebP image, the following error will display.

But now, version 5.8 will allow you to upload WebP images to your WordPress sites. Then, you don’t need to get support from any other plugins. The upload will be implemented in the same way as any other WordPress permitted file types before that.

That being said, WordPress 5.8 won’t help convert any image format to WebP. Besides, when you are using an unsupported browser, your images will be automatically converted to JPEG or PNG. Therefore, you still need an image compression plugin like EWWW Image Optimizer, Imagify, or SiteGround Optimizer.

Test WordPress 5.8

To test WordPress 5.8, you can use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.

Download the plugin and activate it on your WordPress site then.

Next, go to Tools > Beta Testing. And the screen as below will display.

In the WP Beta Tester Settings tab, select Bleeding Edge and Beta/RC Only.

After that, WordPress displays prompting you to update. Once receiving the welcome message, you get started to experience WordPress 5.8.

WordPress 5.8 Release Schedule

• Beta 1 – June 8, 2021
• Beta 2 – June 15, 2021
• Beta 3 – June 22, 2021
• Beta 4 – June 25, 2021
• Release Candidate 1 – June 29, 2021
• Release Candidate 2 – July 6, 2021
• Release Candidate 3 – July 13, 2021
• General Release – July 20, 2021

For a final word,

There will be a lot of changes and improvements in WordPress 5.8. The most outstanding points surely come from Gutenberg Full Site Editing. But it’s not all about the second WordPress release of 2021. Apart from the changes to Gutenberg, you will find other interesting features such as WebP format support and block updates.

You are using the Woostify theme and wonder whether our theme has any limits to this WordPress update? The answer is NO. We can say for sure that Woostify can work well with all the WordPress updates, so please feel secure.

Hope that our article can provide you with useful information about WordPress 5.8 update. Then of all these features, which one makes you excited about? Please let us know. Then we can give you more details about it.