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WordPress 6.0 – Big Improvements To Full Site Editing And The Block Editor

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WordPress 6.0, coming out on May 24th, is full of new features and improvements for Full Site Editing and the Block Editor. Of course, we made sure WPML is fully tested and compatible with this WordPress release from day one.

WPML Has You Covered

WordPress 6.0 Introduced a Taxonomy-Related Issue

At the very last minute, our team has caught a change introduced in WordPress 6.0 causing issues with translated content that has any taxonomy terms assigned to it. This includes categories, tags, and custom taxonomies.

We already released a WPML 4.5.8 hotfix and before updating to WordPress 6.0, you should update WPML on your sites to this version.

In the meantime, if you had sites running WPML 4.5.6 or older with a beta/RC version of WordPress 6.0 you should follow the instructions on the related erratum page.

We are constantly watching the development of WordPress. This allows us to make WPML ready for major WordPress releases before they even go live.

And as you can see, this is also true for WordPress 6.0 – WPML is ready for it.

Full Site Editing Improvements

In case you missed it, WordPress 5.9 introduced Full Site Editing, a way to edit your whole site, your whole theme, from header to footer, using blocks. Please note that you need a block-based theme to use this feature.

WordPress 6.0 aims to greatly improve and build upon the Full Site Editing features.

Easy Theme Styles Switching

WordPress 6.0 allows you to switch your whole theme style with a click. This means you (or the theme developer) can add different style presets to your site and then easily switch between them.

Simply click the Styles button in the top right corner of the editor and then on Browse styles. You will see available styles and can click to switch between them.

New style switcher in WordPress 6.0

Export Your Block Templates

As Full Site Editing allows you to design your whole site, you might want to reuse your templates and layouts on another site. WordPress 6.0 makes it both possible and easy to export your theme template files with all the customizations.

In the top right corner, click Options (three dots) and then Export.

Exporting your theme templates and layouts in WordPress 6.0

New Blocks for Full Site Editing

When editing your theme and templates, there is a variety of new blocks at your disposal.

Blocks for Displaying Comments

WordPress 6.0 introduces a number of blocks to display comments in your templates. The most important one is the Comments Query Loop block. Just like the Query Loop block, it’s a sort of a container block that holds different comment-related blocks. This includes blocks for displaying the comments title, template, author name, content, and more.

WordPress 6.0 introduces the Comments Query Loop block

Read More Block

You can now use a separate Read More block which links to the post. It allows you to customize this link with a custom text, background, and other options.

No Results Block

You can use the No results block inside a Query Loop block and define the message that is displayed when there are no results for the current query.

Post Author Biography Block

You can use the new Post Author Biography block to display the current post author’s biography.

Avatar Block

Finally, you can now also display the avatar (profile picture) of any user. It can be an avatar for a specific user you select or the one for the current post’s author.

Block Editor Improvements

WordPress 6.0 brings an array of improvements and new features to the Block Editor itself. Here are some of the top ones.

Easily Select Text Across Multiple Blocks

Selecting text across multiple blocks used to be difficult but this is now fixed and you can easily do it.

WordPress 6.0 makes it easy to select text across multiple blocks

Lock Blocks

Until now, other users could easily edit and permanently change the templates, layouts, and reusable blocks you design on a site. WordPress 6.0 allows you to lock blocks and prevent users from applying certain actions to them.

To lock a block, select it, click the three dots in its menu bar and then click Lock. You will then see a pop-up dialog with options on what you can prevent users from doing to this block. For example, you can prevent deleting or moving a block.

WordPress 6.0 allows you to lock blocks and prevent unwanted changes to them

Responsive Rows and Groups

When using the Row or Group block, you can now define how their contents behave on different devices and screens. For example, you can select to display them in a row or stack them vertically.

WordPress 6.0 brings responsive controls to Row and Group blocks

There’s Even More

These are all just top features in WordPress 6.0. Other notable mentions include:

  • Ability to set a featured image in the Cover block
  • Spacing option for Gallery Images
  • Border option for the Columns block
  • Ability to select multiple blocks in the List View
  • Accessibility improvements

…and more.

Updating to WPML 4.5.8 and WordPress 6.0

You should definitely update your site to WPML 4.5.8 before updating WordPress to 6.0. In your site’s admin, go to the Plugins page and find WPML. You should see a prompt that there’s a new, 4.5.8 version available. Simply click to update WPML.

If you don’t see the update there, go to Plugins → Add New, click the Commercial tab and then click the Check for updates button.

To update WPML manually, get it on your account’s Downloads page.

Then, when WordPress 6.0 goes out, you should get a prompt in your site’s admin area about it. Depending on your site notification settings, you will probably also get an automatic email from your site.

Renewing your account (especially with an automatic renewal) lets you always have access to WPML updates so that compatibility with WordPress, themes, and plugins is never an issue.

Looking Forward to WordPress 6.0?

Well, that’s a lot of new features for one release! Are you looking forward to these major enhancements? Did you already try out the new Full Site Editing features in WordPress?

Let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

20 Responses to “WordPress 6.0 – Big Improvements To Full Site Editing And The Block Editor”

  3. Hmm. With more than a dozen client websites using WPML and WP6.0 due for release tomorrow, this warning comes too late. Nearly 6pm in my time zone and there’s no way I can get all those sites backed up and updated in time. What do you suggest if we run into problems?

    • Hi, Debs! I completely get what you’re saying and this only happened because our team actually caught this issue over the weekend and pulled extra hours just to get the fix ready and fully tested yesterday (on Monday). That’s also the reason why this release (and the related newsletter) went out at 6 pm (European time), because the whole team was testing to make sure there are no other side effects to this. Please remember that WPML powers more than a million websites, and every fix and code change needs to be deeply tested and confirmed before going out.

      If you run into any issues, please report them in our Support Forum. We will definitely prioritize any tickets that might be related to this issue. Thank you for your comment and understanding!

      • Unfortunately all my sites auto-updated to WP6.0 before I was able to update WPML, so what should I do now? Update WPML and cross my fingers? 🙂 Grateful for any suggestions, thank you 🙂

        • Hi, Debs! First, you should update to WPML 4.5.7 in any case, so feel free to do so now.

          And then, the question is, did you edit any content on your site after it auto-updated to WordPress 6.0? If you didn’t, there’s no problem at all, you’re all good to go. 🙂

          • I don’t always know if clients have updated their own content and if so, when, so I guess I will have to deal with issues as they arise.

            The first issue has already arisen on the very first site I’ve tried to update to WPML 4.5.7. Error message: “Update failed: Download failed. Forbidden”

            Guess I can try downloading 4.5.7 from my WPML dashboard and uploading it manually, but not sure if that would make things worse.

            And annoyingly, content does need to be updated on this site today, so I’d appreciate if you could confirm whether a manual upload of 4.5.7 is the correct next step.

            Thanks.

            • I don’t know what could cause the “Forbidden” issue but if it persists, it’s best to open a ticket in our Support and let our supporters take a closer look.

              In the meantime, of course, you can manually upload/update WPML and it will be just fine. Please do this before any content update and you should have no issues at all. Thank you!

  4. Hi, how come the update is not pushed to all v4.5.6 websites yet? I manage 17 websites with WPML, only 8 can see the v4.5.7 update.

    I know I can force to get them in plugins » new » commercial to manually check for updates, but that’s a lot of extra steps for something that should automatically be available for an important update like this (normally it’s just a single click in my WP management tool to update all my websites).

    Thanks
    JP

    • Hi John-Pierre! Thank you for a very good question. This is by design, otherwise, when we publish a release, our server could get overloaded with pinging all the sites running WPML. This is why there is a 24-hour “cap” for when a site must get this info (and in this way, the process is distributed over time). So, you can either manually override this by going to the Commercial tab, or you could wait a bit (in this very case, another 5 hours from now) and the update will definitely be visible on all your sites.

      • Thank you for explaining Dario. Makes senses there is a server overload prevention.

        For future, could there be an improvement to releases updates to all registered sites on a WPML acount at the same time? I guess like me, most agencies will want to keep all their sites on the same versions. An alternative is the ability to manually force the release to all registered sites (on the registered sites page in ‘my account’) with a single click (as opposed to login + 4 clicks on 17 individual sites).

        Thanks
        JP

        • Actually, that sounds like an interesting idea. I will share it with our team at our next team meeting later this week, thanks John-Pierre!

  5. I’m still having issues with post categories with WordPress 6.0 and WPML 4.5.7 – can these issues be caused by first (automatically) installing WordPress 6.0 and then afterwards updating WPML to 4.5.7? If yes, is there an easy way to fix?
    Thanks, Kilian!

    • Hi, Kilian! I’m sorry to hear about this. It would be best to create a ticket about this in our support and let our supporters check this out thoroughly.

  6. Hey

    unfortunately, I did update my website to WordPress 6 and I got many problems.
    how can I back to previous version

    thanks
    samy

    • Hello, Samy! I’m really sorry to hear about your issue. Please, create a ticket in our Support Forum and our supporters will help you. We need to see where the problem is and if it’s even related to WPML or WordPress 6.0 in general. Thank you!

  7. Hi Dario,

    I cannot update my WPML Plugin. So I have to buy the new version right. Can I easily install and activate or should I deactivate the old version first? Or will it replace the old version?

    Thank you
    Monique

    • Hi Monique,
      If you have an active WPML subscription then you should not have any issue with updating WPML.
      If I understand correctly what you wrote your subscription might have expired and in that case, you will need to renew it.
      You should see a link in your WordPress admin that will send you to our page to renew the license, and in case you have issues with renewing through that link our admin team will be happy to help you, just email them – hello@wpml.org.

      I hope that helps.

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