WordPress 6.5 Beta is now available. This is the first beta released as part of the 6.5 development cycle and can be deployed to non-production environments in your WordPress VIP dashboard. WordPress 6.5 Beta 1 contains approximately 681 enhancements and 488 bug fixes for the editor, including about 229 tickets for WordPress 6.5 Core. The current target for the final release is March 26, 2024.
What is being added or changed?
This year’s first major release will add finesse and fine-tuning to how you control your site-building experience, with lots to explore specifically for developers. You’ll find more ways to manage your fonts and styles, notable upgrades to synced patterns, a collection of Site Editor and performance updates to help you get things done, and new ways to leverage design tools in Classic themes.
WordPress 6.5 will include breakthrough foundational APIs that will start to transform how you use blocks to build memorable experiences. This release invites you to dig into these early-stage frameworks, discover how you’d like to see them evolve, and have an impact on their future improvements and capabilities.
Some of the changes include:
- Font Library: A new tool for managing typography across your site, allowing the installation and management of local and Google Fonts without coding.
- Synced Patterns Upgrade: Enhanced synced patterns let you make specific content changes within a design template, perfect for recurring elements like testimonials or case studies.
- Block and Custom Fields Connection: The new Block Bindings API enables connecting core block attributes to custom fields or other dynamic content, simplifying the use of custom fields.
- Interactivity API: Integrated into Core, this API offers a standardized method for adding interactive front-end experiences to blocks, enhancing user engagement.
- Enhanced Revisions: More detailed style revision history in the Site Editor, including time stamps and summaries of changes.
- Classic Themes and Appearance Tools: Classic themes can now opt into appearance tools, providing access to design options like spacing, borders, typography, and color.
- Design and Editing Improvements: New design tools and Site Editor updates streamline workflows and enhance creativity, including background images for Group blocks, aspect ratio for Cover blocks, and shadow support.
- Data Views in Site Editor: New data views for organizing and managing site components, leading into the Admin Redesign project.
- Plugin Dependencies: Improved management for plugins requiring other plugins, with a new header for required plugin slugs.
- Performance Gains: Over 110 performance updates, significantly speeding up the editing experience.
- Accessibility Improvements: More than 65 updates to enhance accessibility, focusing on contrast, focus, and element positioning.
Please refer to WordPress.org announcement for more details.
How to test the upgrade on a local environment
The quickest way to test locally is to use the VIP Local Development Environment.
To update an existing environment:
vip dev-env update -w=6.5 --slug=mytestsite
To create a new one:
vip dev-env create -w=6.5 --slug=mytestsite
How to test the upgrade on a VIP Platform environment
You can update your non-production environments by run the `trunk` version of WordPress from within the Software Management section of the VIP Dashboard or by running the vip config software update command with VIP-CLI. For example:
vip @mytestsite.production config software update wordpress trunk
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