The First Major WordPress Release of 2020 is Now Available!
WordPress version 5.4 is now available and has lots of refinements to polish the developer experience. It is the first major release of the year and will ship with some significant improvements.
WordPress 5.4 brings many features, improvements and bug fixes to the block editor, with a considerable number of versions of the Gutenberg plugin merged into the core. It introduces interesting improvements in the Site Health Tool and in the REST API.
In this article, we will show what's coming in WordPress 5.4 with features & screenshots:
The Block Editor Improvements
WordPress 5.4 is focused around improving the block editor by including new features and extending the existing blocks. This is great news for content creators as they will now be able to do more with blocks inside the content editor. The markup and style changes on the Block Editor are the followings:
The legacy editor - class prefix has been removed from block-editor scripts and now developers should only use the block-editor- prefix.
The edit-post-layout__content class has been removed from the DOM of the block editor.
Several div wrappers have been removed from RichText and other blocks as redundant. This change brings significant performance improvement and simplifies the DOM tree, which should be appreciated by block and theme developers.
Block paddings and negative margins have disappeared. Block styles should change accordingly.
The New Welcome Guide Modal
WordPress 5.4 will come with a new welcome guide popup to introduce new users with the block editor. It is a simple slide-show that explains blocks, points users to the block library, and a link to block editor tutorial.
New Blocks in this version
WordPress 5.4 will also bring two new blocks to the library: Social Icons Block & Buttons Block. Social Icons block allows you to easily add links to social media profiles inside your WordPress posts and pages. You can also click on an icon to provide a link to your social media page.
The button block will be replaced by the buttons block. The new buttons block now allows you to add more than one button side by side.
Block Improvements
WordPress 5.4 will come with many improvements to the WordPress block editor as well as individual blocks. There are some of the enhancements including More Color Options for Blocks, Drag and Drop to Upload Featured Image, Change Text Color Inside Paragraph Block, Fixed Block Toolbar on Mobile, Easily Select Gallery Image Size and so more.
This major WordPress version comes with many significant features and improvements for the developers. I hope from this article you got an overall idea about WordPress 5.4.
You can download WordPress 5.4 or visit Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now. Sites that support automatic background updates have already started to update automatically.
Log in to cPanel ⇒ go to the SOFTACULOUS APPS INSTALLER section of the cPanel home screen ⇒ click any of the options under Categories. In the icon list at the top right, ⇒ click the icon (All Installations icon) ⇒ Locate the application that you want to update ⇒ and click the icon (Upgrade icon).