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WordPress 5.8: Latest Changes (Template Editor!) - read the full article about wordpress 2021, Web Development and from SmartWP WordPress Tutorials on Qualified.One
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- Hey, its Andy from Smart WP, and welcome back to another video.
Today, were gonna be going over the changes in WordPress 5.8, and Im really excited about it, so excited that I made this graphic.
Wow.
Now, enough messing around, lets just hop right into the changes.
Now there are a lot of changes to go over, especially in Gutenberg.
Theres now a template editor.
Now, no themes currently support this, I dont think yet, but I have it up here in the beta site right here, and you can see that I have a new option called Template, and now you can actually make templates.
For example, if you want to make your own blank template, a lot of people like to have like a landing page or something like that without the header and footer, you can do it all using this tool.
It is kind of still in its early phases, but I think once this is actually supported by themes, this will be a really cool feature.
So let me just show you a little bit how the template editor works.
Let me just make a new template here called Blank Page, and you can see we have, were still using Gutenberg.
So we have these new areas and new blocks.
For example, we have site title, the site tagline.
You can see now we have the post content, so we can actually move how things are all around the page.
For example, we can actually remove our title from our site, remove this little bar here.
And now Im gonna publish and its gonna save the changes to our page and our templates, so let me hit Save, and let me view the page, after hitting publish.
And you can see now, we dont have a header on this page.
Now speaking of new blocks, theres a ton of new blocks, and one of them, I am so excited for.
You can actually make your own custom loop now.
So what that means is you can loop through your posts and display them, kind of like showing your recent posts, or you can even filter by category, something like this.
Before, you had to use a plugin to do this, and it was really not the best experience, so its nice to see that its all built in.
Let me just show you a little bit how that works.
Im gonna go in and add a new block, and if we do a browse all, we can go and find the new block here.
So you can see we have a query loop and you can even like pull in things like the post date and title.
So lets just start with the query loop, and you can select the general layout.
For example, grid view or carousel view.
Lets do grid for the example.
And there are some pre-made templates here we can use.
Well just pick this one here, three column grid.
And you can see were in the query loop here, and you can pick all your settings over here.
You get an inherit the query from the template.
You can filter down to specific categories, specific keywords and other things like that.
Let me just go into one of the posts here and you can see kind of how it works.
You have the query loop, the post template, and then we have groups and things like that.
So for example, if you wanted to show the date on this below the post title, you could easily do that by just bringing this up and you could see it did it to all of our posts in the loop.
Now I still think this is kind of complicated, but for people who have heavy workflows in Gutenberg, this is a very welcomed change.
Im excited to play with this more.
Now lets go on to some more Gutenberg changes.
Now, one thing I really like about this update is it has a new button to pick the parent block that youre in.
Now, what does that mean? Normally, if youre editing content in a column, sometimes it can be hard to actually pick the column to edit, like the actual column itself.
Let me just show you what I mean real quick.
So for example, right now I have a two column layout.
You can see Im editing the content here.
And sometimes you want to edit the actual layout of the column that youre in.
Of course you can use the little navigator on the bottom left, but now theres a dedicated button that selects the parent element.
So Im selecting the actual column itself now, and then you can see the parent now is the columns itself, and then of course you can edit the columns here and things like that.
Welcomed change, especially for people who are new to Gutenberg and might be having trouble picking the parent element.
Now speaking of another improvement, the list view up on the top left here, when you click it now its a full height of the browser, so its a lot easier to see everything in your page.
I think this is gonna be another great change for finding the specific elements on your page that you need to modify.
And theres some other smaller changes, like if you have a reusable block, theres now revisions in there.
Another interesting modification is to the image block.
So I have some images up here.
Let me exit the list for you here.
So you can see, I have images here and if you click on them, theres a new duo tone feature, so let me click that.
And you can see, this actually lets you add a unique effect to your photos.
I think this is gonna be really good for like background photos or something like that, something you want to kind of want to abstract some of the detail from.
I do like that you can do black and white and things like that, and of course you can pick your own values here.
So if you want to make it purple and white, you could do that.
Now, theres also a lot of updates.
Theres a new block pattern directory, which I think once thats actually implemented, it will be cool to see.
We cant actually see it here yet, I dont think.
And theyre also dropping support for IE 11, which I assume youre not using Internet Explorer still.
And last but not least, theres actually a new block editor for when youre editing your widgets.
So lets go in and show you that.
Well go to Appearance and well go to Widgets.
And you can see now the widget editor is actually in the block editor.
So you can now see that the widget area is actually a Gutenberg editor, so you can easily do all the normal things you used to be able to do, plus now it actually add blocks.
So any blocks that you would normally be able to use in Gutenberg, you can use in the widget editor now.
Overall, some great improvements to WordPress and WordPress 5.8.
Obviously most of it is in Gutenberg, but I think the more that this gets refined, the more that people are gonna want to use it.
And overall, the better experience everybody gets from WordPress.
Now this video was recorded with the WordPress 5.8 beta, so some things might change in the future, but overall, these are all the features that were gonna see in 5.8 and its going to be releasing at the end of July.
I hope you found this update video helpful.
Remember to like and subscribe for more WordPress content and check out SmartWP.com for WordPress tips and tutorials.
Thanks for watching, bye.
SmartWP WordPress Tutorials: WordPress 5.8: Latest Changes (Template Editor!) - Web Development