The first release candidate for WordPress 5.6 has been released in November then the WordPress team has released four more release candidate versions. Finally, WordPress 5.6 has been released on December 8, 2020. Its name comes from the legendary performer Nina Simone, who is known for tunes like “Feeling Good”, “Young, Gifted and Black”, and “Four Women”.
New features of WordPress 5.6
WordPress 5.6 brings users several ways to set their ideas free and bring them to life. It supports an ever-growing collection of blocks as your brushes.
WordPress 5.6 provides greater layout flexibility with single column blocks, designs using mixed widths and columns, full-width headers, and gradients in users’ cover block.
Further, some themes have preconfigured block patterns that make setting up standard pages on your site a breeze. Let the power of patterns streamline your workflow and save you clicks. It also enables users to upload their videos with subtitles or captions.
Twenty Twenty-One
According to the announcement, Twenty Twenty-One is a blank canvas for users’ ideas, and the block editor is the best brush. It is built for the block editor and packed with brand-new block patterns users can only get in the default themes. Twenty Twenty-One offers a range of pre-selected color palettes in pastel, all of which conform to AAA standards for contrast.
Improvements for everyone and developers
There are also many improvements for everyone and for developers. Expanding auto-updates, Accessibility Statement, Built-in Patterns are improvements for everyone. On the developer side, REST API authentication with Application Passwords, More PHP 8 support come with WordPress 5.6 and jQuery updates.