Wordpress Masterclass: Part 15 - What's New In WP Version 5.9

In this video course, we’re going to learn about the updates to the new version of WordPress, that’s 5.9.

In the next several classes, we’re going to do a more detailed look at a few of those updates, like the full site editing, or FSE, the much awaited changes to the editors ListView feature, the navigation block, the new patterns library@wordpress.org, the new block themes, and so on.

You should hold off on updating to a major release like 5.9 for at least a few days, minor releases, like 5.9.1 or 5.9.2, for example, should be updated immediately. Because those are usually security related or patching some of the bugs that were found in earlier versions. Some of these additions and changes you get with 5.9 will only show up on your site if you are using one of the block based or full site editing themes. Otherwise, you still get some pretty cool upgrades. Once we eventually have 5.9 installed, check out the “What’s New” page where it gives you kind of an overview of the big changes in 5.9.

And if for some reason you install and get lost, and you can’t find the “What’s New” page anymore, go to your domain name slash WP dash admin slash about dot php, that’ll bring you right back here. And while you also have the credits and the freedoms and the privacy stuff, we are only going to be concentrating on the What’s New. Now we do want to point out that we have three different sites set up here. This gray blue colored one is 5.9 with a block based theme, which is going to let me show you some of the things that you’re only going to see when using 5.9 with one of the few block based themes that are currently available. Then there is a blue color background, which is using the default 2021 theme, which is not a block based theme. In this site, you’re going to see when you’re not using a block based theme after upgrading to 5.9. And then we’ve got this one with a dark background, which is the older version 5.8.3, the last version before 5.9 came out, just so we can kind of compare them.