Welcome, WordPress 5.4 “Adderley” | Improved Block Editor, New Blocks, and Exciting Enhancements

WordPress 5.4 "Adderley"

The major release is finally here with the name WordPress 5.4 “Adderley”. The update includes improved Block Editor, New Blocks, exciting enhancements, bug fixes, and more.

As per the schedule, WordPress 5.4 “Adderley” was released yesterday on 31st March 2020. This major update was named after Nat Adderley, an American jazz musician.

If you’ve been updated with the latest buzzes on WordPress, you might know about the major changes in WordPress 5.4. The new WordPress 5.4 “Adderley” comes with features and updates that we already discussed in the Betas and Release Candidates. This time around, WordPress has definitely brought some major improvements: drastically improved block editor, two new blocks, exciting refinements, and bug fixes.

Now, let’s have a closer look at the added features in WordPress 5.4 “Adderley”.

Enhanced Block Editor

The default block editor in WordPress 5.4 includes features you saw in Gutenberg plugin updates from v6.6 to v7.5. This means lesser bugs and more influential block editor.

WordPress 5.4 will enable Fullscreen mode for the WordPress editor by default. Fullscreen editing helps in writing without any distraction for better content creation.

A direct drag-and-drop feature has been added to the Featured Image section. You can simply drag an image and drop it to the Featured Image section to set it as your featured image for the post or page.

WordPress 5.4 adds color options for blocks like Cover, Group, and Column. You can choose background and text colors for all the blocks inside a group block. Moreover, you can select background and text colors for the columns block.

Not only these, but there are many other block editor enhancements that will uplift your overall WordPress experience.

New Blocks

This major release includes two new blocks: Social Icons and Buttons.

Social Icons Block: Allows you to easily add and display your social media profiles on your WordPress posts and pages elegantly with sophisticated Social Icons. There are three style variations available as well as 39 different social networks.

Buttons Block: Allows you to add multiple buttons at one time. There are two different styles, custom text, background colors, and gradient background color options.

New Welcome Guide Popup

WordPress 5.4 introduces a new welcome guide popup to help you with the Block Editor. This guide will explain what blocks are, points users to the block library and include a link to block editor tutorial. It is a pretty exciting feature as many of us are still not sure about the block editor and have difficulties using it. This new guide concept will surely be a great help to all those who are wanting to get started with Gutenberg editor.

Developer Goodies
  • Two new actions let you add custom fields to menu items—without a plugin and without writing custom walkers.
  • Enhancements to Favicon handling
  • On the Menus admin screen, wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields fires just before the move buttons of a nav menu item in the menu editor.
  • In the Customizer, wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields_customize_template fires at the end of the menu-items form-fields template.
  • Radically simpler block styling. Negative margins and default padding are out! Now you can style blocks the way you need them. And, a refactor got rid of four redundant wrapper divs.
  • If you build plugins, now you can register collections of your blocks by namespace across categories—a great way to get more brand visibility.
  • Let users do more with two new APIs: block variations and gradients.
  • In embeds, now the block editor supports TikTok—and CollegeHumor is out.

Know more about WordPress 5.4 “Adderley”.

Check out the WordPress 5.4 field guide to get the important links and information related to this major release.

WordPress 5.4 was led by Matt MullenwegFrancesca Marano, and David Baumwald.

Other Squad Members:

There were 552 contributors with props in this release. With so many new and improved things this time, WordPress 5.4 release comes with WordPress fully translated into 46 languages with more on the way.

Have you updated to WordPress 5.4? Did this newest version of WordPress fulfill all your expectations? Let us know in the comments section below.

 

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