New in WordPress 5.8: Blocks as widgets, Gutenberg Performance & Duotone

WordPress 5.8 is the second of four planned major updates for WordPress in 2021. We took a look at the beta of the new WordPress version, which was officially released on 20 July 2021 under the name “Tatum”. What can you expect in WordPress 5.8? What should you prepare for? And what about the long-awaited Full Site Editing? An overview.

Blocks as widgets

One of the biggest and most visible changes in WordPress 5.8 will be that you will be able to use blocks from Gutenberg instead of widgets in the sidebar or footer, for example. WordPress is thus following its long-term plan to be able to build the entire WordPress website – not just articles or pages – with blocks (full site editing).

If you click on the “Widgets” area in WordPress 5.8, you will now see a view that is more reminiscent of the Gutenberg editor when writing a new blog post. The individual widget areas of your WordPress theme can be selected via a drop-down menu. For example, the sidebar, the footer, possibly also the header, etc.

There you can insert blocks and edit them the way you want them to be displayed on your site. For example, you can also individually activate or deactivate the WordPress Dark Mode, which was added in WP 5.6, for each widget block. All previous or classic WordPress widgets should continue to function as normal.

Incidentally, there is also an official WordPress plugin for the widget area that reverses this very serious change. Classic Widgets ensures that you see the familiar widget view again. It will be supported until at least 2022. We already know this from the Classic Editor, which displays the editor in the familiar view despite Gutenberg and should help to appease the Gutenberg opponents in the WordPress cosmos.

New blocks in WordPress 5.8

In addition to the completely redesigned widget screen, there are also completely new blocks in WordPress 5.8, including blocks for sidebars, the website title, the website description, the logo and a new Query Loop block that allows you to display a list of posts in different ways.

Another new feature is the so-called Duotone block, which allows you to use image effects in media blocks or blocks from third-party providers that support this. If you edit an image in a WordPress block, you will see a small circular icon in the block editor in WordPress 5.8.

Here you can select the two colour tones with which you would like to edit your image. In addition to eight predefined styles, you can also select the highlights and shadows colours yourself. Depending on the image and colour selection, this can create interesting variations of your image. If you work a lot with images, you can get creative here. By the way: PDFs can also be inserted with the file block in future.

The blocks for the title, description and logo of a page in particular show how WordPress continues to drive full site editing forward. The voices of those still hoping for a reversal of Gutenberg’s chosen course are likely to become even quieter with WordPress 5.8.

Improving usability

Of course, WordPress 5.8 has also worked on the user-friendliness of the blocks again. Interaction with nested blocks has been simplified through the use of a permanent toolbar button for selecting the parent block, the introduction of a list view should help with navigation in complex blocks and templates and the editor for reusable blocks has been improved and now also supports revisions.

WordPress is also further developing the block templates. These can now also be displayed as a selection when inserting a block. WordPress 5.8 also offers significantly more options for customising the design of the blocks. In particular, WordPress mentions more settings for colours, fonts and spacing.

Internet Explorer 11 support ends

At the end of May 2021, Microsoft announced that it would be retiring Internet Explorer in 2022 and ending support for the browser. Instead, Microsoft wants to continue to focus on the Chrome-based browser Microsoft Edge in future.

WordPress is doing the same as Microsoft with WordPress 5.8 and will no longer optimise the new version and all subsequent versions for Internet Explorer 11. We recommend taking a look at an analysis tool of your choice to find out which browser your visitors are using to access your website.

In Google Analytics, for example, you can do this under Target group -> Technology -> Browser and operating system. If the proportion of users with Internet Explorer is still relatively high for you, which depends on your target groups, then you should test intensively before updating to WordPress 5.8 to see whether everything is still running smoothly after the update.

In most cases, however, the proportion should already be very low – and will continue to fall over the coming months due to the end of Microsoft support for Internet Explorer.

Performance of Gutenberg

The performance of the editor has also been improved with Gutenberg 10.8 and WordPress 5.8. WordPress emphasises this in the respective blog posts on both developments.

This is illustrated by a test article that the team of developers has equipped with 36,000 words and 1,000 blocks. This is a disproportionately large file (for comparison: a normally formatted A4 page has around 400 words). However, the test helps to clearly visualise differences in performance.

And there is: from Gutenberg 10.7 to Gutenberg 10.8, the loading time of the editor has been reduced by almost one second from 6.75 seconds to 5.78 seconds. Anyone who has ever edited an extremely large text file in WordPress will appreciate this increase in performance.

WordPress 5.8: Other new features

Of course, these are only the main changes that the WordPress team itself prioritises during development. However, as with every update, there are also many small changes that are not immediately obvious.

For example, Twemoji, Twitter’s open source database for emojis, has been updated to version 13.1, giving you more emojis to choose from. The menu when publishing articles has been adapted and is now easier to understand. And there is now support for the WebP image format.

There are also new options for WordPress developers, for example:

• New REST API endpoints in WordPress 5.8 for sidebars, widgets and widget types
• Cached get_pages() calls are accelerated
• Term relationships can be changed when querying contributions in the REST API

If you are interested in all the changes in detail, you can also read about them on WordPress.org. Here you can find the article on WordPress 5.8 Beta 1, here on Beta 2.

Timetable: When is WordPress 5.8 coming?

The exact schedule for the development of a new WordPress version can always be found in the development cycle. Work on WordPress 5.8 began on 23 February, with the three beta versions scheduled for 8 June, 15 June and 22 June, also on a weekly basis. This was followed by three release candidates – also on a weekly basis – from 29 June to 13 July. The final release was then scheduled for 20 July 2021.

By the way: There will be two more major updates in 2021: WordPress 5.9 will be released in September 2021 and WordPress 6.0 will follow in December 2021 – at least that’s the current plan.

Conclusion: What to make of WordPress 5.8?

There are few spectacular surprises in WordPress 5.8. It has long been known that WordPress is slowly but surely rolling out its Gutenberg editor page-wide and “blocking” more and more areas of WordPress. In WordPress 5.8, the widgets have now had to make way for this. Opinions are divided on this development, Gutenberg has enough fans and critics.

Otherwise, the new blocks are not particularly spectacular. The Duotone block for editing image effects is a nice gimmick. And the Query Loop block opens up new possibilities for displaying articles. The end of Internet Explorer 11 support is even more interesting, as there are probably still some websites that are likely to have (at least a few minor) problems as a result.

Overall, the new WordPress 5.8 is not a revolution, but a further evolution of the most popular content management system. It will be interesting to see how full site editing develops with versions 5.9 and 6.0. We will find out in September and December 2021.