Great news everyone!  WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” was released today!  This update has ~500 enhancements and ~400 bug fixes.  Pretty excited to try them out.  Here’s the info from the WordPress website:

Enhanced Writing Experience

Writing improvements abound, whether you’re writing a brand new post or adding elements to an existing page. Explore more ways to streamline your content creation process, including:

  • Select text across multiple blocks for easier copying and pasting.
  • Type two open brackets `[[` to quickly access a list of recent posts and pages.
  • Keep existing styles when you transform some blocks from one kind to another—from a Paragraph block to a Code block, for instance.
  • Create customized buttons and any new buttons you make will retain the style customizations automatically.
  • Make tag clouds and social icons even more appealing with updated settings and controls, and a new outline style for the tag cloud.

Style Switching

Block themes now include the option to contain multiple style variations. This expands the new Style system even further and enables shortcuts to switch the look and feel of your site all within a single theme. In block themes that support this feature, you can change both the available settings, like the font-weight, and the style options, like the default color palette. Change the look and feel of your site with just a few clicks.

More Template Choices

WordPress 6.0 includes five new template options for block themes: author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy. These additional templates provide greater flexibility for content creators. Tailor each with the tools you already know or with the following new options in this release:

  • Featured images can be used in the cover block.
  • New featured image sizing controls make it easier to get the results you want.
  • While editing a template, at the root, or between blocks, the quick inserter shows you patterns and template parts to help you work faster and discover new layout options.
  • The query block supports filtering on multiple authors, support for custom taxonomies, and support for customizing what is shown when there are no results.

Improved Performance in WordPress 6.0

This release includes several updates focused on improving the performance of WordPress. These enhancements cover a range of performance areas including improving the page and post-load speed, reducing the execution time of various query types, caching, navigation menus, and much more. The performance team working group is an important focus area of the core development team. For more information on this group’s work, please follow their work on Making WordPress with the #performance hashtag.