Great news everyone! WordPress 6.6 “Dorsey” was released today! The biggest thing (for people not using Gutenburg) is ‘Rollbacks for plugin auto-updates’. Here’s the info from the WordPress website:
WordPress 6.6 delivers on the promise of a better web by bringing style, finesse, and a suite of creative possibilities to your site-building experience. This version helps you do more with ease, putting enhanced tools at your fingertips and giving you unprecedented power behind the scenes. You will find more ways to create beautiful, coherent design elements across your site, a new layout for quick page previews in the Site Editor, and the safety of automatic rollbacks for failed plugin auto-updates—among many other highlights.
In addition to the new features, “Dorsey” continues to deliver the performance and accessibility gains you can expect from every WordPress release. Explore what WordPress 6.6 has to offer and get ready to let its features take your sites to new heights.
Color palettes & font sets
Add more design options to any block theme. Block theme authors can create unlimited individual color or font sets to offer more specific design options within the same theme. These sets provide more contained design possibilities, allowing for customization without changing the site’s broader styling, beyond color or typography settings.
Quick previews for pages
Simplify your workflow with a new layout built for pages. See all of your pages and a preview of any selected page before you edit via a new side-by-side layout in the Site Editor.
Rollbacks for plugin auto-updates
Auto-update your plugins with peace of mind. Enjoy the ease of plugin auto-updates with the safety of rollbacks if anything goes wrong, improving your site’s security while minimizing potential downtime.
Overrides
Add the ability to customize content in synced patterns. Allow specific pieces of content to be customized in each instance of a synced pattern while keeping a consistent style for all instances, simplifying future updates. Currently, you can set overrides for Heading, Paragraph, Button, and Image blocks.
Performance updates
WordPress 6.6 includes important updates like removing redundant WP_Theme_JSON calls, disabling autoload for large options, eliminating unnecessary polyfill dependencies, lazy loading post embeds, introducing the data-wp-on-async directive, and a 33% reduction in template loading time in the editor.
Accessibility improvements
55+ accessibility fixes and enhancements focus on foundational aspects of the WordPress experience, particularly the data views component powering the new site editing experience and areas like the Inserter that provide a key way of interacting with blocks and patterns
Outro
You can view a full list of new features on WordPress’ website. As usual, you’re site should have automatically updated to WordPress 6.6. If it has not or you’re having issues with WordPress 6.6, please shoot me a message and I’ll get it updated!
About the Author: Tommy DuHamel
