With this monthly episode, we will discuss the upcoming WordPress 5.6 release, latest Black Friday deals for Bloggers and Genesis Block Theme BETA for WordPress.

Blogging Monthly 007 Episode

Hey Everyone, Welcome to the latest episode of Blogging Monthly. This is Sanjeev Mohindra from MetaBlogue and in this episode, we will talk about the latest updates around Blogging and WordPress.

We are coming close to the end of 2020 but before that we have to brace one more major update of WordPress - WordPress 5.6. So, let’s start this month episode with talking about the upcoming features in this release.

WordPress 5.6 Features

Currently, WordPress 5.6 is slated to launch on 8th December unless there are some serious issues in BETA testing. This will be the last major release for WordPress this year and packed with some of the key features.

PHP 8 Support

The first feature coming with the update is support for upcoming PHP 8 upgrade. PHP 8 upgrade will be launched at start of December 2020 and WordPress will have support for it within a week.

Since PHP 8 is a major upgrade and contains a lot of features, you may not want to move your WordPress sites to PHP 8 right away. The WordPress themes and Plugins which you use on your blog also needs to be tested with the latest version before you can think of upgrading the PHP version.

Though, it’s nice to know that WordPress core will have compatibility with the latest version and as soon as other plugins are certified, you can plan the move. PHP 8 comes with many enhancements including JIT (Just in Time Compiler).

For novice, the JIT will convert the PHP byte code to machine code removing the intermediary formats with the help of Dynamic Assembler. This should speed up the PHP code interpretation which intern should help WordPress improve the page performance. If you want to know more about the PHP 8 changes, Kinsta has a good article on it - Check Here.

I use Plesk for managing most of my WordPress installs, so I will be looking for Plesk support of PHP 8. Plesk allows to install multiple versions of PHP and attach web apps to specific PHP version. It means, I can install and test staging sites with PHP 8 before making it live for my sites.

The idea should be to look for sites with a smaller number of plugins and traffic, to see the compatibility with PHP 8. Those should be the sites to move to latest version and see the performance enhancement before moving the real money sites.

Gutenberg Editor Improvement

The upcoming release will pack as many as seven Gutenberg plugin release. All the updates for last seven releases will be pushed into WordPress Core with this release.

There are some minor enhancements on the Information section to communicate the structure and word count more clearly for your posts. Typography section gets an option to set the line height along with font size and weight.

The Block patterns was introduced in WordPress 5.5 and they are getting some nice UI enhancement. Now, they will be organized under category so that users can easily navigate between t...