WordPress 5.6 it’s been among us for almost a month now (it was officially launched in December last year) and it has been without doubt, along with the WordPress 5.5 update, the most important upgrade of 2020.
WordPress 5.6 is loaded with new features and comes with a new default theme: Twenty Twenty-one.
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New Theme by default
WordPress always has a default theme, whose name is precisely the year in which the theme is released. WordPress 5.6 comes with a new default theme named after this new year we have just entered: Twenty Twenty-One.
This new theme uses a pastel green background (which can be changed within the WordPress options) and dark grey typography, and a “dark mode” can be set by activating it in the theme options.
New blocks and functions in Gutenberg
Every new version of WordPress comes with improvements to the Gutenberg block editor, and in this case the new features are the following.
Categories for templates
If version 5.5 of WordPress came with predefined templates to make the formatting of posts and pages more comfortable, now these templates are grouped and categorised.
From this version on, you have available a new block of buttons exclusively for sharing on social networks.
Character counter
In addition to the word counter, WordPress now also gives information about the number of characters in a post or page.
PHP 8 support
Php is the framework that powers WordPress. So, like any other programming language, Php releases new versions from time to time to add new features and improve bugs, and WordPress has to adapt to these new versions.
