The WordPress team announced the release of WordPress 5.9 Beta 1. The team also warned users not to run the Beta version on a production site, since it is currently under development. WordPress 5.9 final release is expected to be released on January 25, approximately eight weeks after the Beta 1 release. During that period, the team stated that testing the beta version is very important to improve the final release as good as it can be.
Full site editing
The features introduced in WordPress 5.8 are combined as Full Site Editing with WordPress 5.9. It was formerly known as Global Styles. The new Styles Interface allows users to interact with the blocks and elements in the WordPress Admin, no code is needed.
Theme.json is also improved to enable features and default styles for the website and its blocks. In 5.9, theme.json is capable of supporting child themes and the duotone treatment. Other features supported by theme.json include:
- Border: color, style, and width augment the border-radius property that landed in 5.8.
- Flex layouts: Block Gap support, courtesy of spacing.blockGap.
- Typography: font families, font style, font weight, text decoration, and text transform.
- Images: Duotones.
The release also includes Navigation Block, an intuitive way to build navigation and Image Block, allowing users to treat single images in the Gallery Block the same way they treat the Image Block.
Users can test the WordPress 5.9 Beta 1 in three ways:
- Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (by selecting the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).
- Option 2: Direct download the beta version here (zip).
- Option 3: Use WP-CLI to test: wp core update –version=5.9-beta1.