Members of the WordPress 6.1 release team recently met for a product walkthrough on Zoom, and Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura gave an informal tour of some of the new features coming in the next release. I was. After a successful walkthrough of 6.0, this gathering on Zoom has become a new part of the release cycle.
The event took place on Tuesday and the recording was released today. If you haven’t kept up to date with the 6.1 development, this short video (embedded below) gives a good overview of the features in their current state and highlights areas that still need improvement.
Ventura starts with a hands-on demo of the Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3) and its stylistic variations. He also detailed the new templates and the ability to create custom his templates.
I’m really excited because it opens up the power of WordPress to everyone. If you have a special category for travel and want to create a template for that category, you can do that. And here’s another improvement. Previously, when I was creating a template, it started completely blank. This loads the most relevant template. In this case it was the archive. In other words, I am using – I am modifying the tag template, but using the archive type as a base. So you don’t have to start from scratch. Obviously, in the future we will probably have a different starting point, just like we use patterns when creating new pages.
He also has more advanced locking features, the ability to create locked patterns that only a few tools are exposed to, improved placeholders, design tools like smooth typography and spacing presets, and more for developers. I also explained the tools for
After the walkthrough, the 6.1 release team joined us to discuss some other core features, known bugs, and outstanding features. They answered a few questions from a virtual audience before drawing their conclusions. Check out the recording below. A transcript is also available in the post.
