The WordPress team announced the release of WordPress 5.9 Josephine. The latest version is named in honor of international jazz singer and lifelong civil rights campaigner, Joséphine Baker. The WordPress 5.9 release was led by Matt Mullenweg.
Full site editing
The first release of 2022 is coming with various new features, including block themes. It provides users with a wide range of visual choiced in the Site Editor, including color schemes, font combinations, page templates, and image filters.
WordPress 5.9 also comes with the first default block theme in WordPress history, named Twenty Twenty-Two. Users who want to try the new block theme can find it with other installed themes after updating to WordPress 5.9. Users can also fined more block themes in the Themes directory and more will be added in following months. These new themes eliminates the need for the Customizer, allowing users to make changes in the Site Editor.
With WordPress 5.9, the Navigation block also offers a new user experience. Users can now choose between an always-on responsive menu and a menu that adapts to the users’ screen size. WordPress 5.9 saves menus as custom post types to the database. The Pattern Directory includes various block patterns. Users will be able to change the header or footer of the websites with a few clicks.
List View and Gallery
With the new revamped List View in WordPress 5.9 users will be able to drag and drop their content where they want it to be. The latest release also simplifies the expanding and collapsing sections as well as adding HTML anchors to the blocks. The Gallery block allows users to treat every image in a Gallery the way they could treat it in the Image Block. Images in the gallery can be styled individually or you can apply all of the images in the gallery.
Download WordPress 5.9 Josephine
To test the new features of WordPress 5.9 users can download the newest version from its official website or update it directly from the WordPress dashboard.