WordPress 5.0 – Features

WordPress 5.0 managed to generate quite a buzz before its launch and managed to live up to all that hype post the launch. WordPress has come up with its major and only update of 2018 at the end of the year and so far, the response from the beginners and the professional coders has been a positive one.

The news about, ‘Guttenberg- The new block-based editor’ to be part of the new update has been the main reason for all the excitement and it does come with a revolutionary change in the way WordPress is used. The update does deliver on one of the stated intents – to make the user experience a simple one for the WordPress beginners.

Let’s look at few of the key features WordPress 5.0 offers

Gutenberg – making editing easier

Her comes to the new editor replacing the classical one. The classical editor is still available but as a plugin. The idea of the new editor is based on blocks. This provides more flexible editing options than the earlier an editor.

The blocks can be anything – images, paragraph text, image galleries, audio players, videos, headings, citations etc.  Once you add a block, you find editing controls to that specific block. This itself is a great step forward in making the editing more simplistic. You would not need to add in additional WordPress plug-ins as earlier or try editing the HTML code to edit certain types of the content you intended to add.

Previewing how your page looks like can be now done the right away.

Reusable Blocks

Have created a new block and intend to use it somewhere else? Gutenberg offers a solution with its concept of “reusable blocks”.

Once you have created a block in the Gutenberg editor, and think that this block can be used in other posts or pages, you can convert it into ‘reusable block’ by a simple hit on a button. When you need it, you just need to again hit a button and insert it wherever you intend to. This provides an alternative option to “shortcodes’.

New Theme – Twenty Nineteen

WordPress 5.0 comes with a new default theme – Twenty Nineteen. This new theme is completely adaptable with the new WordPress editor. It offers a great starter option for anyone who wants to start a new blog or a webpage, providing a versatile yet an easy to experiment option.

Support a new version of PHP

This is something that does not meet the eye. WordPress 5.0 is developed to be able to support the new version of PHP i.e. PHP 7.3. This version would have official support until the year 2022.

New Source code Syntax

It is not all about the beginners. WordPress 5.0 offers exciting options even for the developers and programmers to work on developing themes, plugins etc. The intermediate syntax makes the programme level interaction much easier.