WordPress has released version 6.7, codenamed Rollins. This update introduces better font controls, a new default theme, enhanced design tools for easier page creation, 65 accessibility improvements, and performance optimizations. Version 6.7 focuses on making it easy to build attractive, high-performance websites.
Twenty Twenty-Five Theme
Twenty Twenty-Five is the new default theme that ships with WordPress. Twenty Twenty-Five was purpose intentionally built to offer users an easier and more intuitive experience for creating websites.
The official WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five documentation explains:
“While ideating Twenty Twenty-Five, one recurring idea was that simple things should be intuitive while complex things should be possible. This concept of simplicity and complexity leads to a reliable foundation for extending a default WordPress experience to make it yours.
Twenty Twenty-Five embodies ultimate flexibility and adaptability, showcasing the many ways WordPress enables people to tell their stories with many patterns and styles to choose from.”
The key improvements are:
- Better Patterns
WordPress patterns are pre-designed ready to use blocks for different parts of a page. This allows users to choose from pre-made sections of a web page like the header, call-to-actions, pricing tables and on. Twenty Twenty-Five ships with a wide range of patterns that are appropriate for different kinds of sites. - Improved Styles
Better support for fonts in multiple languages plus bundled color variations.
New Templates
There are three base templates that can serve as a starting point for creating a website.
The new template versions are:
- Personal Blog (Default)
The Personal Blog template is focused on simplicity and ease of use. - Photo Blog (Alternative)
This template has multiple layouts that are suitable for image heavy sites. - Complex Blog (Alternative)
This template is intended for complex websites, offering more design flexibility.
Typography
As part of the emphasis on a better design experience, WordPress 6.7 features better font management that allows users to more control over fonts.
The WordPress announcement explains:
“Create, edit, remove, and apply font size presets with the next addition to the Styles interface. Override theme defaults or create your own custom font size, complete with fluid typography for responsive font scaling.”
New Zoom Out Feature
WordPress 6.7 has a new design feature that lets users zoom out from the details and see what the site looks like as a whole so that users can swap out block patterns and see what it looks like in macro view. This is in keeping with the focus on making it easy to design attractive websites.
Accessibility Improvements
The documentation for WordPress 6.7 was not as organized as it usually is, making it difficult to navigate to the documentation for the 65 improvements to accessibility are. WordPress documentation is usually better but it seems less organized this time.
This is what the announcement said about the accessibility improvements:
“65+ accessibility fixes and enhancements focus on foundational aspects of the WordPress experience, from improving user interface components and keyboard navigation in the Editor, to an accessible heading on WordPress login screens and clearer labeling throughout.”
Performance Updates
The latest version of the WordPress core ships with faster pattern loading and better PHP 8+ support. Old code (deprecated) is removed to create a more lightweight theme, plus a new auto size component that improves lazy-loading images.
That last improvement to lazy loading should help improve core web vitals scores because the Auto Sizes feature helps the browser select the right image size from the CSS and use that to build the web page, rather than using the image size itself. CSS is usually downloaded before images, so having to depend on image size is redundant and slower. Chrome shipped with this ability last year, December 2023.
Engineering lead at Google Chrome Addy Osmani tweeted about it last year:
“Chrome is shipping
support for lazy-loaded images with srcset, this allows the browser to use the layout width of the image in order to select the source url from the srcset.
For lazy-loaded images, CSS is often available before the image load begins. The browser can take the actual width of the image from CSS and use that as if it was the image’s sizes.”
The official WordPress announcement for the auto sizes for lazy loading explains:
WordPress documentation for the auto sizes feature explains:
“WordPress 6.7 adds sizes=”auto” for lazy-loaded images. This feature, which was recently added to the HTML specification, allows the browser to use the rendered layout width of the image when selecting a source from the srcset list, since lazy loaded images don’t load until after the layout is known.”
Is It Safe To Download WordPress 6.7?
Most developers discussing the latest version of WordPress in the private Dynamic WordPress Facebook group report that updating to the latest version is easy and trouble-free.
But some developers reported maintenance mode errors that were easily resolved by deleting the .maintenance file (maintenance mode file. The .maintenance mode error doesn’t happen because there’s something wrong with the update, it’s usually because there’s something going on with the upstream server that’s providing the update. The WordPress.org 6.7 documentation page was temporarily down so maybe the WordPress servers were experiencing too much traffic.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero