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Web Dandy Web Design Articles

WordPress 6.5 "Regina"

by Web Dandy on April 12, 2024

First Major WordPress Release In 2024

Like all new WordPress versions, WordPress 6.5 "Regina", released on April 2, 2024, has been named after after a renowned jazz musician, violinist Regina Carter.

WordPress 6.5 looks to continue improving the site building experience by giving the user more control.

Major Areas of Improvement

WordPress 6.5 brings with it a number of changes including:

Performance

Performance metrics for both the site editor and post editor have been improved. There is 5x faster typing processing and 2x faster editor loading.

Two New APIs

Two new APIs are introduced in WordPress 6.5.

The Interactivity API enables developers to add interactions to the frontend of their blocks to make it simpler to build counters or pop-ups and to add more complex features like block based mega menus, carts or checkouts.

The Block Bindings API makes it easier to bind core blocks to read from different sources without needing to understand how to write a custom block from each new source that the block needs to read from.

Opt-in Design Tools For Classic Themes

Many users are still using classic themes over block themes. Classic themes use PHP and rely on the manual writing of CSS for styling; block themes use blocks patterns and settings and HTML with PHP as a fallback. You can design and style your site without having to edit your site files or use CSS.

With WordPress 6.5 classic themes can take advantage of styling options such as border colour, radius and width, link colour, margin, padding, line height, and more. WordPress 6.5 also creates a new Patterns tab for classic themes.

All-New Font Library

The new font library functionality is much needed and addresses the GDPR issue of being able to use local fonts instead of Google fonts in a more seamless way.

WordPress 6.5 enables fonts to be manually uploaded to the Media Library and the uploaded font to be chosen for headings and text etc. through a new Appearance > Style > Typography function, without having to manually code fonts within the WordPress style.css file. This is a major improvement to the way that WordPress site typography can be managed and controlled.

Addendum

#1 Due to an issue with the initial package, WordPress 6.5.1 was not released. WordPress 6.5.2 was released on 9 April, 2024 and was the first minor released for 6.5. This security and maintenance release features 2 bug fixes on Core, 12 bug fixes for the Block Editor, and 1 security fix.

#2 WordPress 6.5.3 was released on 7 May, 2024 and was a minor release which featured 12 bug fixes in Core and 9 bug fixes for the block editor.

#3 WordPress 6.5.4, minor release, featured 5 bug fixes in Core.

#4 WordPress 6.6, a major release, was made available on 24 June. This release contained 3 security fixes and 3 bug fixes in Core. The security fixes were: a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability affecting the HTML API, a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability affecting the Template Part block and a path traversal issue affecting sites hosted on Windows. The XSS vulnerabilities can allow for site takeover by an authenticated, contributor-level user.