WordPress 6.9 released – what new features are there?

WordPress 6.9 – nicknamed “Gene” after Gene Harris was released late last night. After the talk that WordPress 6.8 was to be changed to one release a year, halfway through the year it returned to a more regular schedule, and just before Christmas we have a new version to play with. You lucky lucky people.

This release is a lot more visible than 6.8, with a number of new features and blocks that are a lot more front and centre. There’s a number of features I’m excited about, and things that just make my job as a developer easier. Here’s what I’m looking forward to the most.

Notes Feature

This is rather exciting, and now that the full site editing is largely done, the new collaboration approach within WordPress is going ahead. The groundwork has been laid in this release (there’s a push to put it into 7.0, but I don’t think it will happen). But the first feature that exists is this “Notes” feature, that would allow people to leave notes on various blocks in the dashboard.

With the forgiveness being begged of a lot of my contemporaries, I think the Notes feature is probably my favourite feature, as you can make notes on any document or block to discuss things with users. Very useful for collaborative documents, and a few clients of mine share me into Google Docs with entire discussions in the sidebar. These can now be done within WordPress.

Two ways I’d extend it is potentially the following with:-

1. Post/Page publishing blocked until all comments and notes are resolved.
2. Display notes on the front end if logged in (useful for receiving feedback if you’re are developer).

Somebody go ahead and make them. Genuinely I’m very excited by this update.

New Blocks

There are a number of new blocks added to WordPress 6.9. I can’t remember the last time a bunch of new blocks were added. But at least one of them is incredibly useful. That is the accordion block, which will allow you to hide and show text easily in an accordion. The design is relatively plain, but with a bunch of CSS I’m sure you can style it up.

Hopefully it’s extensible by adding FAQ Schema to it, so improving visibility in search engines. Somebody make that plugin! Update: as was shared in the comments by Birgit Pauli-Haack, there already exists an FAQ Schema toggle plugin – you can get Andrew Viney’s plugin from Github, or a Justin Tadlock snippet that uses classes should you know what you are doing.

You can also now create a math block, using MathML and LaTeX (two markup languages) to create complex formulas. Again, most blogs won’t use it, but for those that do, it’ll be incredibly useful to have mathematic formulas in valid HTML.

Similarly to the post query block, you now have a term query block. This will allow you to list a bunch of taxonomy terms based on various queries. I always felt the post query block was a bit lacking, so it’ll be interesting to see how this works.

You can also have the time to read and word count as native blocks. Common functionality that is now native in Gutenberg. Finally, you can also have stretchy headings and paragraphs. This isn’t too useful I think in the vast majority of cases, as I think it’s useful for designs. Looking forward to clients breaking sites with that one!

Finally, you can now also hide/show blocks within the post editor. I’m not sure quite how useful this is, maybe for admins to hide blocks from authors, but it’s in there.

Command Palette

The command palette – one of WordPress’ new features – is now more available in the dashboard. The WordPress keyboard shortcut CMD+K (or Ctrl+K on Windows) brings up a Macbook like search box, that would allow you to search the entire WordPress site.

If you are a power user of WordPress, this command palette is a great way to navigate WordPress. It even brings up plugin functionality nicely (in the example above you can see the menu from my plugin Check Search Engine Visibility on Migration).

Abilities API

One feature that has been touted that I’ve not really explored as I don’t really understand it yet is the Abilities API. For my understanding, it allows plugin authors to register their plugin’s functionality in a machine readable way. It’ll allow AI agents, to the best of my knowledge, to change or do functions for your plugin quickly and easily.

I don’t really understand it, but too many smart folk in WordPress list it as the killer feature within WordPress 6.9. So we’ll see how it goes! I’m listing it as a feature that I’m excited about purely because some smart people are excited by it.

Other WordPress 6.9 new features

The above are the new features in WordPress 6.9 I’m most excited about. There are more, and I’ve listed them below:-

• Improvements to the Drag & Drop experience within WordPress.
• Work has begun to the post editor to be changed to an iframe.
• Various API updates, improvements to performance and accessibility improvements.

You can read more about these in the Release Notes.

Be Sure to Upgrade

Honestly, there’s loads in WordPress 6.9, so be sure to upgrade. If you are on one of my WordPress Maintenance plans, you should already be on WordPress 6.9, or will be very soon. If not, send me an email and see what I can do for you.

Featured image Gene Harris Poster from Robert Barney, licenced by Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0