WordPress 5.8 is now on a public reach!

Along with nearly 300 improvements and new features, the first release candidate for WordPress 5.8 is rolling out on 20th July 2021. This release is named after an innovative jazz musician, Art Tatum. The second major release of 2021, continues with lots of enhancements and progress on the block editor towards the promised future of full site editing.
Before the publishing of 5.8, four different Beta versions were released at different time intervals for bug testing. Possibly, some of you already explored these new features. If so, you may be the most excited one to get the final update. No matter what, WordPress 5.8 is a great surprise for all of us WordPress enthusiasts. If you are new in this field, Trend of 2021 – Blog vs Vlog, could help you to start a journey.
However, You can download the latest WordPress and enjoying them on your own sites. Let’s take a look at the trend-breaking features before dawning into the new era.
Features in WordPress 5.8
1. Full Site Editing Template (FSE)
To facilitate the WordPress with Full Site Editing feature, WordPress Core is bringing a new template editor. The plan is to create a full site editing tool using the block editor, so we can expect to see more interesting enhancements with this feature.
The main purpose of launching a template editor is to enable you to build and save templates for a WordPress website and use them for any post or page.
2. Introducing theme.json
Bringing the concept of theme.json is the first step in managing styles for future WordPress releases. After creating a theme.json file in the theme’s top-level directory, themes can configure the existing editor settings as well as the new ones as they are introduced.
According to WordPress: The addition of the theme.json file also provides a way for theme authors to control these settings on a per-block basis ― something that wasn’t possible before. The example below shows how to disable custom colors for all blocks but enable them for the paragraph block:
{
"version": 1,
"settings": {
"color": {
"custom": false
},
"blocks": {
"core/paragraph": {
"color": {
"custom": true
}
}
}
}
}
3. Added New Widget Screen for Classic Themes
In classic themes, you can place blocks in the widget area. There is a very strong possibility of completely depreciating the use of widgets in the future. For now, blocks are replacing the widgets because many sites highly depend on the widgets. So, they are not eliminating its use for now.
But themes can drop out of the widget screens if they don’t want to use them. Simply remove the theme support to do so.
remove_theme_support( 'widgets-block-editor' );
4. Supporting WebP images
After installing WordPress 5.8, your website will support the new image format of the image called .webp format. It will reduce the size of your images by 25-34% less than of the PNG and JPEG format, without losing the quality.
5. Improvement in Block Editor
The block editor section is one that regularly improves with every update. WordPress 5.8 will now allow you to easily group blocks. It is making possible using Nested block. However, sometimes difficulty can arise to select the parent block inside a nested block. There you also can see the improvements in the list view of blocks in your post or page.
6. Block Pattern
With WordPress 5.8, everyone will now reach a Block Pattern Directory. It is similar to the Plugin and Theme directories that provide you a way of setting up layouts of blocks through themes and plugins. With this, anyone can create and share a Block Pattern with any WordPress user as well as any WordPress user can use these patterns to create beautiful content.
7. Dropping IE 11 support
With this update, WordPress will no longer support Internet Explorer 11. It is strongly recommended to switch to modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, or Microsoft Edge for anyone currently using IE11. However, IE11 users have been shown a warning that it is considered outdated in the WordPress dashboard for the last 17+ months.
Moreover, you can see lots of UI enhancement, improvements in site builders, Duotone effect for images in blocks, select tools with block handles, and lots of changes in blocks. Aren’t you excited to work with those changes? Try it now! And Don’t think “This is it!”. Because it’s just a beginning.