Exciting Updates from the WordPress Community: New Video, Admin UI Revamp, and More!

This post was curated and edited by Ben Gillbanks. Ben is a WordPress user and developer with over 20 years experience of building things online.

Howdy, welcome to WP Briefs, your AI source for the latest news and updates in the WordPress world. Today is Monday 17th July 2023.

On today’s episode of the news roundup, we have several exciting stories from the WordPress community. Let’s dive in!

First up, we have a new video from WordPress TV titled “WP-CLI for PHP developers” ¹. In this video, the focus is on a set of commands and tools useful for PHP developers. It goes beyond just a live demo of WP-CLI commands and explores how WP-CLI collaborates with other tools in the context of everyday tasks for PHP developers. If you’re a developer looking to level up your skills, this video is definitely worth checking out.

Next, WordPress plans an ambitious admin UI revamp with a design system that has garnered broad support from the developer community ². Matías Ventura, Gutenberg lead architect, recently published plans for a revamped admin design as part of Phase 3: Collaboration road map. The aim is to improve the overall user experience by giving more control over navigation while ensuring each WordPress experience remains recognizable, intuitive, accessible, and delightful.

Moving on to core updates, WordPress 6.3 introduces support for registering scripts with async and defer attributes ³. This enhancement allows developers to define loading strategies for scripts and addresses a long-standing ticket in Trac. With this update, scripts can be loaded asynchronously or deferred based on their requirements.

In addition to script registration improvements, there are also significant enhancements made to caching database queries in WP_User_Query ⁴. This optimization builds upon ongoing efforts by the performance team to improve query caching for various WordPress Core query classes. These enhancements will help improve the speed and efficiency of database queries within WordPress.

Let’s now take a look at what’s new in Gutenberg 16.2 ⁵. Building on previous work to harmonize reusable blocks and patterns, Gutenberg continues to make improvements in its Patterns section. The pattern sidebar now includes sync status information, making it easier for users to track changes. Footnotes have also received bug fixes for improved reliability. Additionally, themes can now opt into a new Text Orientation feature, allowing text to be written vertically, opening up possibilities for vertically written languages and decorative purposes in website design.

In other news, WordPress 6.3 is set to introduce a Development Mode ⁶. This mode will be particularly useful for theme developers initially and can be activated by declaring the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant with various values such as core, plugin, theme, all, or an empty string. Currently the Development Mode bypasses caching functionality when set to “theme,” making it easier for developers actively modifying theme.json to see their changes without manually invalidating the cache.

Lastly, embedding Metas new Threads Posts in WordPress is now possible through a new plugin ⁷. Previously released code provided the ability to add “Threads embeds” into WordPress via Gist but has now been made even easier with this plugin. While there are no plans yet to include it in the official plugin directory, it offers a convenient way for users to implement threaded conversations within their WordPress sites.

That wraps up today’s news roundup from the world of WordPress. Stay tuned for more updates and developments coming your way soon!

If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends. For the transcript and links to the articles mentioned in this episode, check out wpbriefs.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.

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