WordPress 5.4 is planned to be released on March 31, 2020. The first release candidate for WordPress 5.4 is already released on March 03, 2020. In this blog post, we will discuss the new features and important code changes coming in WordPress 5.4 so that the theme and plugin developers can prepare themselves and plan the version updates accordingly.
New Features – WordPress 5.4
- Social Icons Block: A new block named as Social Icons is added in this version to add links to about 40 different social media networks.
- Buttons Block: Buttons Block lets you group multiple buttons in a single block.
- Gradients API: A new Gradients API is added for the color variations to be used with group or button blocks etc.
- Block Scaffolding: A new npm package @wordpress/block released which can be used to quickly create a plugin for custom Gutenberg block using single command i.e. npm init @wordpress/block <plugin-name>
- Block Collections API: Block collections API is released to categorize the blocks into collections/groups just like we have categories concept.
- Block Variations API: This API can be used to create copies of a block sharing common features and functionality with small changes.
- Nav Menu Hooks: New nav menu hooks are provided for adding custom fields to the nav menu admin screen.
- A new alias function apply_shortcode() is added for do_shortcode() function.
Block Editor Markup and Style Changes – WordPress 5.4
- Many block editor classes with the editor- prefix are changed to block-editor- prefix
- The class of wrapper element i.e .edit-post-layout__content is removed
- Built-in paddings and margins added to blocks are refactored
Other Markup and Class Changes – WordPress 5.4
- Markup of get_calendar() function is changed to remove tfoot element and the nav element is added for next and previous month links.
- Four other classes are added for calendar markup i.e. .wp-calendar-table, .wp-calendar-nav, .wp-calendar-nav-next, .wp-calendar-nav-prev
What To Do?
WordPress plugin and theme developers should thoroughly test their plugins and themes against the markup, style and class changes depicted in the WordPress 5.4 version. If some custom styles were applied using the classes which are removed or changed then those changes may break the overall layout. So now is the time to plan for the changes coming in WordPress 5.4 version so that the themes and plugins work perfectly after updating the WordPress version to 5.4. I hope this post will act as a guide for successfully updating the WordPress version to 5.4 and fix the issues arising due to the style, classes and markup changes mentioned above.