WordPress 6.7 released – what new features are there?

WordPress 6.7 – nicknamed “Rollins” after Sonny Rollins – was released overnight. It’s been a bit of a trying time in the WordPress community recently, with some tiring actors. Nevertheless, this is the last release of 2024, and it’s a big one. Here’s the WordPress 6.7 new features I’m most excited for.

The New “Zoomed Out” Layout Editor

This is pretty cool.

As the block based editor goes towards patterns, one of the slight difficulties has been visualising how a layout looks when you’re viewing a whole page. This is now no longer an issue, as picking a “Pattern” in the editor will zoom it out, giving you an overview of the page as it will tend to look on monitors.

It’s really cool. It’s incredibly cool! The only thing I cannot see yet is that it seems to be only in the Pattern Pallette. I want to see how my page looks for when I’m building it from the top. Please and thank you!

Improved Query Loop Block

I’ve not really seen too much of this and I couldn’t work out much from testing but there appears to be an “Improved Query Loop” block. Here’s the blurb from WordPress:-

The Query Loop block is improved, as it now automatically inherits the query from the template by default, eliminating the need for manual configuration. This means your posts display immediately in both the editor and on the front end, streamlining the process so users can focus on content without extra configuration needed.

WordPress 6.7 Beta 1 Post

Out of the box it suggests that the query loop block, which is one of my more used blocks, is easier to configure. From testing there did appear to be some default settings, although my test account has 3 posts in total, so probably not the best test. I’ll stick a test below and figure out what’s being done. But still, exciting!

Fluid Typography for Styles

Finally!

Styles are a relatively new feature that allow creation of font styles and different typography elements on the page. There has been Clamp CSS standard which has allowed typography to be fluid between two values for a long old time. You basically set a minimum and a maximum size as well as a default size of the font, and depending on the viewport, your font will be between the minimum and maximum values.

Finally, this is in WordPress core.

Unfortunately, it’s only in the Styles editor, and I don’t really use this too much. If this can be added to the default font editor, that will be great, please and thank you!

Preview Options API

There’s now a “Preview Options” API. Although not out of the box it’ll allow users to preview a post in other ways. So for example, if you edit a newsletter within WordPress, the Preview Options API will extend the menu to include this.

Okay, not the biggest change, but for larger, more distributed sites I can see this being useful. I’ve a potential project next year that could use this to push results to Mastodon, for example.

Twenty Twenty-Five

Theres a new theme in town! Twenty Twenty-Five is the new WordPress default theme that should be included, and – surprise surprise – it’s another block based theme. It looks pretty though.

It follows the similar styles of past years. Nothing too overly engineered, but a bunch of default patterns to build on top of. Nice if you wish to use it.

Other WordPress 6.7 new features

The above are the new features in WordPress 6.7 I’m most excited about. There are more, and I’ve listed them below:-

• HEIC image uploads (popular with iPhones) are now able to be uploaded. I’m an Android user so I wouldn’t have been aware of this, but it’s nice if you upload images from your phones (oddly…my clients don’t). They will be converted automatically to JPEG files too.
• Expanding Block Supports. There’s loads here, the grey ticks are new.
• Native custom fields integrated into the block editor. But we won’t talk about that.

You can read more about these in the Release Notes.

Be Sure to Upgrade

If you are on one of my WordPress Maintenance plans, you should already be on WordPress 6.7, or will be very soon. If not, send me an email and see what I can do for you.