Here Are Some Interesting New Features Of WordPress 5.7 For Techies...Check It Out!

Introduction: 

WordPress 5.7 beta has already hit the market for a while now with its launch which was on March 9th 2021. It is one of the first major releases of the year and comes with some new features and improvements.

In this blog, you will see what’s coming up in WordPress 5.7 with all the new features! 

Improvements Done in WordPress 5.7

What are the new improvements done with wordpress 5.7? Cannot wait to know right? Hold On! 

Okay… Here you go techies! 

The WordPress editor is the area where website owners spend most of their time creating pages and writing their content. WordPress 5.7 will also sail through with some exciting new features and enhancements to improve your editing experience.

Let's look at the first one!

Drag and Drop Blocks from Inserter

WordPress 5.7 will allow you to simply drag and drop a block from the ‘Add new block’ (+) inserter into your content area. This way you can choose where to place a block before you drop it on the post canvas.

Full-height Blocks Coming in WordPress 5.7

Do the full-width blocks for your cover, columns, and group blocks interest you? This allows you to create visually beautiful layouts. WordPress 5.7 will now allow you to create full-height blocks too. These blocks shall fill in the height of the user’s screen allowing you to create even more eye-catching layouts.

Block Variations Now Have Their Own Descriptions

WordPress 5.7 will now show descriptions for block variations. For example, the social icons block has Facebook, Twitter, and other social icons. You can view them in the block inspector with a preview.

Social Icon Sizes

WordPress 5.7 will permit you to adjust the size of the icons in the social media icons block. 

Hold on it gets more interesting!

Improved Buttons

WordPress 5.7 introduces vertical alignment for buttons in the block editor and the users will also be able to choose from a preset percentage width for their buttons.

Adjusts Font Size in More Blocks

Another improvement in the block editor is the facility to adjust the font size in more blocks including the list and code blocks.

Easy Migration from HTTP to HTTPS… Read On!

Previously when you moved WordPress from HTTP to HTTPS you had to manually update URLs embedded in your content right?  Not doing so, resulted in the mixed content issue. WordPress 5.7 will make it easier to migrate your website to HTTPs. It will show the availability of HTTPS in the site health menu as a critical issue.

Through this, users will be able to click on a button to update the WordPress URLs. This will switch your WordPress and Site URL settings, and update URLs in your content to use HTTPs.

Standardized WP-Admin Color Palette

WordPress 5.7 will also standardize the wp-admin color palette. Basically, WordPress uses Sass to generate CSS files on the fly.

WordPress came with a limited set of color schemes and introducing new color schemes was hard as developers had to deal with Sass variable-based systems. Don't You Worry Developers!

 In the upcoming 5.7 release, WordPress will collapse all colors used in the CSS to one of the available shades of blue, green, red, yellow, grey, black, and white. This will provide developers a palette with a wider range of light and dark colour schemes.

New Robots API

WordPress 5.7 has introduced a new Robots API. This API allows developers to schematically control and update the robots meta tag on a website.

Robots meta tag allows you to tell search engine bots how to crawl and index a website. This can be achieved by adding a robots.txt file to your site’s root folder or by using the robots meta tag.

A new function called wp_robots will be introduced in WordPress 5.7. Developers will be able to modify the robots meta tag by adding their own filters to the function. Here is an example of how it would work:

function wporg_wp_robots_add_follow( $robots ) {

    $robots['follow'] = true;

    return $robots;

}

add_filter( 'wp_robots', 'wporg_wp_robots_add_follow' );

WordPress 5.7 will also add a max-image-preview:large directive to the robots meta tag by default. This will allow search engines to use the large image for preview in search results.

Here is how it would look in your site’s source code:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

    <head>

        <meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large" />

    </head>

WordPress will automatically hide this tag for websites that have search engine visibility turned off in the settings.

If you want to disable this and let search engines decide which image to use for the previews, then you can add the following code to your theme’s function.php file or a site-specific plugin.1

remove_filter( 'wp_robots', 'wp_robots_max_image_preview_large' );

Lazy Loading iFrames

Well, it's not the way it sounds! Read on to know the truth..

WordPress 5.7 automatically adds up to the  lazy load to iframe embeds. Lazy Loading is an important technique used to improve your website speed during a page load. It basically tells the user’s browser to load an item when it is viewed.

WordPress already uses lazy loading for images by default since WordPress 5.5.

This means all embeds that use iframes, such as Youtube Videos, will use lazy loading to improve your page load speeds.

If you are using Smash Balloon’s, Youtube Feeds, then it already optimizes your video feed by better caching and delayed loading.

Under The Hood Changes

WordPress 5.7 also will be  bringing many changes for developers to explore and use in their own themes, plugins, and projects.

 Following are some of these under the hood changes: Have a look!

WordPress 5.7 has introduced new functions is_post_status_viewable() and is_post_publicly_viewable() to check if a post is publicly viewable. Render block function will now allow developers to filter the content of a single block. (#46187)

WordPress 5.7 will add a filter hook to manipulate $user_data variable during retrieve_password() function. 

 This will enable developers to perform custom validation checks during password resets (#51924). Developers will be able to change the ‘Go to site’ link displayed in the login page footer by using a new login_site_html_link hook. (#35449) Two new functions get_post_parent() and has_post_parent() will be available in WordPress 5.7 to determine if a post has a parent and to get the related parent post as an object. (33045)

So techies! Hope this blog was helpful.. 

Now you can get ready for this wonderful facility onto your fingertips! Go give it a try!