With the release of WordPress 6.7, you’ll notice improvements to the Newspack interface that facilitate workflows. Let’s dive in.
Find the Publish, Save, and Trash Buttons on the right side of your toolbar
The WordPress team has made several improvements to the publishing workflow based on user feedback, which includes changes to the locations of the Save and the Publish Buttons which are now located to the right on your toolbar.
Instead of these…
…you’ll now see these.
And to keep things lined up, the confirmation to publish is now swapped with “Cancel,” so “Publish” is on top of “Publish,” and you no longer see the first button peeking out from behind the confirmation. This change should alleviate some anxiety by reducing the chance of accidentally clicking the wrong button.
Based on feedback, the Trash Button was moved to a more prominent position. You’ll see it appear after the post is auto-saved. Please keep sharing your feedback, as it very much does and can shape what lands in WordPress.
Zoom out on patterns to see how they’ll appear live
Patterns are under the plus sign at the top left of the editor. Clicking that opens the list of blocks. Patterns is the next tab at the top. To give you a better sense of placement on a page or post, the editor zooms out as soon as you click “patterns.”
When you insert a pattern using the Block Inserter, the editor will switch to a new Zoom Out view. This will give you a better overview of the entire page and how the different sections flow together. Zoom Out makes it easier to focus on the overall design of the page and makes it much effortless to edit patterns as large building blocks. Clicking on the layout will edit entire top-level blocks.
From the Zoom Out view, you can shuffle existing or newly-added patterns to load a different one from the same pattern category. Once you’re done making edits, you can close the Zoom Out view by toggling the button in the top-right corner, or by closing the pattern inserter. This new feature will be especially helpful when building out landing pages, or creating a Media Kit using our recently updated patterns.
The Zoom Out feature is only available through the pattern selector on Newspack sites for now, but the toggle should be more widely available in the editor in the future.
Block Inserter now stays open while in use
The Block Inserter will now stay open while inserting Blocks and patterns, rather than closing after each insertion. Once opened, you’ll be able to interact with the editor and go back to the inserter without having to reopen it. It will now only close while editing when you toggle it closed again, making it much easier to use when adding multiple blocks.
Change the color of individual items in a List block
Now you can change the text color of individual list items. Each list item now has its own text color control within the List block, which is used to create bulleted or numbered lists.
Say you need people to pay special attention to one or more items in a list, changing the color of that list item will help draw attention to it. This functionality can help you capture your reader’s attention beyond simply making a line item bold.
Give Buttons Block some background color
There’s a Buttons Block for an overall set of buttons, and a Button Block, which is one of the sets. Now, you can change the color of the overall set using the Buttons Block to draw attention to the calls-to-action on your site. Its icon shows two buttons.
Improvements to Post Locks accuracy
WordPress includes a feature that enables a lock screen when another person is editing the same post or page. They use the Heartbeat API to figure out how often to check if someone is editing a post. WordPress 6.7 increases the speed of that checkpoint, which improves the accuracy of whether a post should be locked or not. Now you’re much less likely to run into a locked screen on a post or page when someone has already finished editing it.
Media uploads enhanced
In previous versions of WordPress, if you uploaded any media (like an image, audio file, or video) to a post or page and then navigated away before it finished loading, there was a chance the upload would silently fail. As of this release, uploaded media will continue loading in the background without issue.
Meta box updates allow iframing editor content
To make it possible to iframe the Block Editor, WordPress 6.7 includes a change to the post meta boxes and the toggle-able sections that appear below the Post Editor. This should be a seamless change for all of you, but could require changes by plugin authors to ensure content in the meta boxes doesn’t get cut off. Plugins recommended by us shouldn’t have an issue. But, if you come across one on your site after this release, please let us know!
If you’d like to learn more, you can read about this change on WordPress.org.
We’ll answer questions you have about these updates in the #newspack-help Slack channel. Don’t hesitate to reach out!
