WordPress 7.0 – nicknamed “Armstrong” (after Louis Armstrong, I thought there was already a version named after him, but there we go) was released late last night. This was a delayed release, after although the numbering system doesn’t put a huge amount of influence on the Semantic Versioning that software (including my plugins) tend to use, sometimes a big release falls on a .9 to .0 release (I seem to remember the leap from 3.9 to 4.0 was a large jump).
Anyway, 7.0 is released and whilst it is sizeable, it isn’t quite as big as previous large releases. With good reason, the proposed feature of real time collaboration was pulled a couple of weeks back. It made sense, as the feature, whilst cool, needed a lot more testing. It worked well locally but probably not well elsewhere.
This meant I did have to rewrite a lot of this posts a few days before the release. Sigh.
Nevertheless, it does contain including a whole new admin interface and colour schemes. So there are some big changes. Heres’ my favourite new features to be included in WordPress 7.0.
Visual Revisions
One of WordPress’ features has had a major upgrade. Revisions in block editor posts and pages are now a lot more visual. Akin to code reviews in Github, you can see where things have been added, removed or changed (green, red and yellow specifically).
This is really cool, as often I found the previous revisions page a bit clunky. The new version seems a lot better to use. Hopefully with this new look people will adopt it a lot more.
For a more detailed overview, Anne McCarthy put together an excellent revisions video so you can see how it works.
There is one issue that I have with it: any post type that has any sort of meta box (so Yoast SEO, ACF or even plugins like mine like Preload LCP Image) would mean it switches back to the classic editor. Hopefully that gets fixed in WordPress 7.1!
Hide Blocks on devices
This is so needed.
Previously I’ve been writing styles that hide/show blocks on desktop or mobile. Now I don’t have to. Click on any block and you can choose to hide/show the blocks on each individual viewpoint.
Again, been standard for a few things like Elementor, but another thing we don’t need to code when building sites!
New Blocks – Breadcrumbs Block & Icon Block
There’s a couple of new blocks to play with, the icon block and the breadcrumbs block. The icon one I’m incredibly excited about, as adding icons has just become a lot easier. I’ve always had to roll my own, so a dedicated block I can hook into would be perfect. It’s got a really nice interface, and I’ve not really looked, but I’d imagine there’s some filters where I can add and remove icons as you wish.
There is also a really subtle change in the heading block. Previously you had to choose a heading, and then select the size you want. There are now dedicated shortcuts to select heading 1 through 6 easily.
Not a life changing change, but should speed my development time up a bit when I’m building pages.
The AI connector interface
There’s now a new options page which I’m not a fan of, but it’s in there. The AI Connector interface is a way to register your WordPress blog with with AI agents. Right now, you can connect your chosen ocean boiler of choice to WordPress, and have it handle a few things within it’s own AI plugin which is highlighted above. Things that are fairly common, like alt tag generation, content generation and images. You know, the stuff that’s taking jobs. The theory is you install one of these connectors, and you can store the keys there, and then you can use those keys for other AI tags.
And yeah? It’s a thing. I don’t know if I’d ever feel confident in storing my keys on the site, you know, just in case a rogue plugin hits and breaks something. Seems a bit dangerous to me. I won’t be using it, but if you are, then go ahead.
It’ll be interesting to see the adoption on this. Right now, Windows has less than 4% adoption of Copilot, and there are ways to track the adoption of these plugins and installations. What happens if there is a similar adoption rate to Windows? Would it be quietly disconnected? We’ll see.
Additional CSS added to blocks
A cooler feature is that additional CSS can be added to individual blocks. It feels like this has been an Elementor thing for ages, so it’s nice for WordPress to catch up within Gutenberg.
Other WordPress 7.0 new features
The above are the new features in WordPress 7.0 I’m most excited about. There are more, and I’ve listed them below:-
- Font library for all themes – you can now upload your own fonts to override those in specified themes.
- There’s been a subtle change to the gallery block, in that if you enlarge on click you can get an arrow/keyboard navigation to other images.
- There’s now view transitions in the admin section. It looks pretty cool as you are navigating your website!
- The paragraph block can now have a lot of new elements, including text indentation, columns for prose, and orientation.
You can read more about these in the Release Notes.
Be Sure to Upgrade
Honestly, there’s loads in WordPress 7.0 so be sure to upgrade. If you are on one of my WordPress Maintenance plans, you should already be on WordPress 7.0, or will be very soon. If not, send me an email and see what I can do for you.
“Previously you had to choose a heading, and then select the size you want.”
I hope they’ve kept the # ‘shortcut’ from markdown because I use that far more than the size choice thingymabob 🤞
They did! As a Mac user who has to use 3 keypresses to get the # key, I never used it, but tested it and it still works 🙂
Woohoo! (Also, had no idea it was so difficult to get the # on a mac 😅)