Exploring WordPress 5.9: Full Site Editing, Block theme flows, Patterns Explorer, & more

howdy my name is ann mccarthy i'm a developer relations wrangler for automatic and this is a video focused on the 5.9 wordpress release and the exciting features coming to your site the release is set for december 14th so think of this as a fun sneak peek at what's to come keep in mind that some of what's shown will likely adjust slightly as bugs are found and fixed this might include items being pushed to a future release with that in mind let's dig in so what's actually coming to wordpress 5.9 let's jump in and add talk at a high level about what's coming so block themes and their flows for editing templates and template parts are planned so block themes are new themes built with blocks in mind and they include templates that have the ability to edit things like your 404 page or your home page directly your headers and footers so a lot of work has been done to actually create these themes and to create flows to make it intuitive for you to edit all parts of your site and there's the new 2022 default block theme it's super exciting there's a great post that i'll link to in the description below there's a styles interface which builds on work done from 5.8 to bring in a new ability to actually style your site so this includes everything like colors topography and block specific styles there's various design tools including more layout control options dual tone options dimension controls and more there's the navigation block which enables you to edit your site's navigation menu both in terms of structure and design there is the pattern directory enhancements and just general pattern enhancements and then there are a ton of ui ux enhancements as well as performance enhancements that come with every release so what are the benefits of this release for starters this release will take all the great new features enhancements and gains from gutenberg 10.8 to 11.9 this includes everything from a more robust list view to make it easier to navigate your content including dragging and dropping collections of blocks two design tools that allow you to space button blocks exactly as you want for many of the newer features though like the styles interface and the navigation block you will only be able to access them if you're using a theme that supports full site editing features most of these things are called block themes you might also hear the term universal themes and the 2022 default theme is for the very first time a block theme but whether you're using a block theme or not there's a lot to look forward to in this release let's jump into a demo now to see some of the more cutting edge features though coming wordpress 5.9 throughout the demo i'll do my best to show off the features coming to everyone too so to start just a quick overview of my setup i'm using the tt1 blocks theme and i'm also using wordpress 5.8.2 with the latest version of gutenberg from trunk so if we see any bugs this is expected as there is active work being done through the gutenberg plugin so for now you'll notice that there are some new options here navigation menus is part of an experiment i'm using but with 5.9 using a black theme you will see this new editor beta styles templates template parts so now let's jump into the editor itself so at a glance you'll notice that you can actually edit your header directly so at this point you'll see i entered in the header here and i can also do the same if i scroll down and find my footer so the first time you're actually able to dig into these parts of your site and edit them directly so for example the site title block which has used both the header and in the footer i can edit it to say my youtube video whatever i'd like i can change this to be centered i can change the actual size of it all that good stuff here we won't go into that now though because there's too much to show off um for now let's jump into styles this is my favorite features coming to wordpress 5.9 when you're using a block theme and this allows you to change everything everything from the typography to the colors to the layout on your site as well as specific blocks if you click in here you'll see all the blocks listed and you can go in and actually customize them to your liking so if you want the button block to look a certain way you can set it up here you can also set the typography the colors so for example if i want to actually change the background i can make it something like this go black for now i'll keep it at white just because i like how classic it looks you can also see that there are some core colors coming in and there's also some themes specific that the theme can provide for you so from here we'll go back out and just based on any of these changes um you'll notice that i can actually update this to say the title if i made changes in here like for example if i added my own custom color um you'd actually see these saved as well so we'll say orange hit done now i have my own custom color palette that i can use throughout the site you can then hit save and you'll see custom styles there so for now as i mentioned you can actually edit your headers and footers and there's also this new fancy mode that i can get into called the template part focus mode so if i go here i can actually edit the header directly what i love about this mode is that i can drag it to be big and small including this is actually i want to show off the navigation block the navigation block is a new block that i mentioned is coming that allows you to change both the display of your menu and to add items to it so in this case let's say i want to add in a link to my contact page i can do that here i can also do cool things like adding the site logo or a search functionality so i can add this indirectly you can edit it to my likings maybe i want it like that i can also go into settings here maybe i want a little bit smaller i can do that here and once i have it to my liking i can hit save and actually go back before doing that let's show off one of the newer features that is coming to the navigation block and one of my favorites which is this overlay menu so this actually collapses the navigation options into a responsive um navigation menu so in this case i can have it so it just shows up when it's on mobile you can test that here you'll see it collapses into the little uh hamburger menu i can also have it always on so let's say i want that as part of my my styles i can have it always on which is really neat as you can see there are a ton of options from typography to colors and more that you can set up here i'm going to do a separate video on navigation blocks so stay tuned for that but for now just know there's a lot of options for customizations and once you're ready to go you can just hit back and now you're back in the same template the same homepage that you're editing before now with the additional ad items added which is pretty neat and from here let's scroll down a little bit and you'll notice the latest posts in these posts listed here and if i open up list view you can actually see these are all powered by the query loop which is a block that came into play in 5.8 there are some new features though that impact the query loop including some additions of to duotone filter applied to the featured image blocks this is one of my favorite features if you've seen other videos i've done i really love the duotone option um so for example i can add this in make them all grayscale actually really like how that looks especially with the bright yellow i could also add my own custom colors so if i wanted to have the shadow set up you can see my custom color that i added in earlier is listed here in global styles which also shows how interconnected the style system is for now though let's keep it grayscale and on it from here once i have it to my liking i can hit save and you'll see all the different options i've updated and this is part of the multi-entity saving finally one of the features i wanted to show had to do with patterns and let's say i wanted to have another call for action here i can actually go in enter the patterns and you'll see this explorer option so if i hit explore you'll also notice the featured section here and these are a set of featured patterns that have been pulled from the pattern directory specifically to democratize design and allow people to have elegant designs on their site ready to use in this case i'm actually going to pull one from the buttons block just a simple call for action you'll see it's placed here so in this case i can also do cool things like add in another button block here so i might say join us and i can customize this i can make it an outline i can add a nice border drag it up and down in this case i'll just manually enter it i can also make the width a bit wider and from there just to show off some of the more tools that are coming there's some neat layout tools so for example if i wanted more spacing between i can do that i can also keep it centered or i can align it different places i can also change the orientation this is one of my favorites in this case i can have it actually vertical aligned or horizontal i really like it vertical so i'm actually going to keep it vertical here and close this out from there another neat feature that's coming to 5.9 that is worth mentioning has to do with list view so let's actually open this up and maybe you know i have two different call for actions i could join our mailing list i have a get in touch schedule or visit perhaps i want to actually label these to make it easier to know which are which because as you can see there are two different group blocks right here so in this case i'm going to open this up here and go to advanced i'm going to call this mailing list and as i'm typing this you'll notice it shows up here in list view with a label i'm going to do the same for this right here i'll call this schedule so now let's say i'm glancing at my content i've been building out this home page and you know what i'm like i have this nice yellow color here i actually really want for now the call to action to be more contact us and join us rather than the mailing list i'm good on the mailing list i can select this and delete it um from the list view i can also collapse so i can fold these down to make it easier to even see the different pieces of content as well so let's say i want to move this up above the query loop i want this above my post i want it to be more in your face about scheduling a visit i can do that as well if i want to undo it i can also just move it back down below which is pretty nifty um but from here hopefully this helps gives you a really good sense of what's to come in wordpress 5.9 as you can see there's a ton of features and i've hardly scratched the surface i highly recommend jumping in to test yourself and on that note let's dig in to how you can do that so i'm sure you're thinking after this demo how can i explore this release right now and the best way to explore is to stay tuned for november 16th when wordpress 5.9 beta 1 will be released i'll link to the plugin in the description below that you can use to test um the wordpress beta tester plugin i highly recommend doing this on a test site since bugs will likely still be there i'll also link to the latest call for testing for the fsc outreach program which i run this call for testing walks through many of the features and gives you a chance to give feedback directly to those working on this release thanks so much for watching if you want to stay in touch you can find me at nomad.blog i have a contact form there and you're welcome to reach out to ask questions or simply say hi i'm also anzazzo on make sock so feel free to bring me there too either way i hope this video helped give you a sneak peek what's to come in wordpress 5.9 and that helped you feel as excited as i do about all the new features that are coming

Channel: Anne McCarthy

Views: 2,218

Keywords:

Id: r59aR1tmY6k

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021