The WordPress 6.4 beta was just made available. We have been keeping a careful eye on the progress and trying it out.

It will come with a ton of new features, speed enhancements, and bug fixes as the third major release of 2023.

We'll provide you with information and screenshots about what's coming in WordPress 6.4 in this article.

Twenty Twenty-Four Is The New Default Theme

Every year, WordPress has a tradition of releasing a new default theme. It usually coincides with the year's final release.

Twenty Twenty-Four will be the new default theme in WordPress 6.4.

Following the Twenty Twenty-Three default theme's design ethos, the new theme will come with an out-of-the-box minimalist layout.

Don't be fooled by its understated appearance, though. This robust theme has a ton of features.

It comes with six different style options and is designed to function nicely with the Site Editor.

Additionally, it comes with dozens of WordPress block patterns that may be used while creating articles and pages or with the site editor.

You may easily add whole parts to your pages or templates with the help of these patterns, which feature many section patterns.

It also ships with four fonts that you can use when working on your site. This brings us to the next exciting feature expected to be released in 6.4, the Font Library.

Manage Fonts Across Your Website with Font Library

WordPress 6.4 will come with a new feature called Font Library. Users will be able to control the fonts used throughout their website and in their WordPress theme thanks to this.

The Font Library can be viewed by users in the site editor's Styles panel. Additionally, they will have the ability to change the fonts on their website.

Clicking on the Fonts icon on the panel will bring up the Font Library.

From here, you can upload fonts directly from your computer.

Do you wish to utilize Google Fonts locally? Google Fonts can be downloaded and installed on a WordPress website using Font Library.

This will download the font files by making a single connection to the Google servers. Fonts will then be served from your own servers after that.

Enlarge Images with Lightbox Popup

Want to open your WordPress images in a lightbox popup?

WordPress 6.4 will allow users to enable lightbox popups for images in their posts and pages.

To open an image in a lightbox popup after adding it, toggle the Expand on Click option under the block options.

Your users may magnify images without ever leaving the page with our easy-to-use image popup.

It's still in its early phases of development and quite rudimentary. For example, you will need to specify the Gallery block for each individual image rather than the entire gallery.

We suggest utilizing NextGen or Envira Gallery if you want a more elegant image gallery and an improved user experience.

For photographers and portfolio websites, these are the top WordPress picture gallery plugins. They come with gorgeous lightbox popups, animations, slideshows, gallery styles, and more.

Improved Command Palette

With the new command palette tool included in WordPress 6.3, users may easily input instructions by utilizing the keyboard shortcut CTRL+K.

WordPress 6.4 will have new keyboard shortcuts as well as a number of tool enhancements. First, there's a small tweak to the design that makes some things a little darker.

Second, new instructions and actions for interacting with blocks have been added. The command palette allows you to copy, modify, remove, and add blocks.

For example, the command palette now allows you to pick numerous blocks and transform them.

Block Editor Enhancements

The main goals of this version are to enhance and expand the current block editor and site capabilities. Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which will emphasize teamwork more, is now under way.

WordPress 6.4 will incorporate many releases of Gutenberg—the block editor's project name—into the core. There are numerous new features and improvements in every one of them.

Here are a few of Block Editor's most visible improvements.

Block Hooks

Developers will be able to use Block Hooks with WordPress 6.4. Plugins might then add blocks automatically when they are activated.

Block hooks, so named because they are modeled after WordPress core hooks, will let plugin writers work with the block editor and extend blocks without actually modifying them.

For example, a login button can now be added to the navigation menu by a membership plugin.

You can turn on or off the blocks introduced by plugins using the block panel, which also displays which blocks have been added by them.

Background Images for Group Block

In the post or full site editor, grouping blocks is the simplest approach to construct distinct portions of a layout.

Users used to be limited to choosing the background and text colors for the group block as a whole. It's also possible to set a background image with WordPress 6.4.

Improved Toolbars for Parent / Child Blocks

When you moved around blocks while working with blocks that have child blocks, the toolbar continued to move and change.

This did not result in the best possible user experience for the Navigation, List, and Quote blocks.

As you navigate the inner blocks of WordPress 6.4, the child toolbar will now be automatically attached to the parent, providing a consistent user experience.

The Outline / List View Revamped

The List view shows you a quick outline of your page or post layout in site/block editor.

WordPress 6.4 will improve the list view by adding some cool new features.

First, you can now rename Group blocks in the list view. This would help you identify what each group block does and will make your layouts more readable.

It will also show previews for images and gallery blocks.

This is immensely helpful and makes the outline view a much more useful tool than ever before. Previously it just said ‘Image ‘and you had to click to select the block and view which image is there.

Improved Pattern Management

In the previous WordPress release, Reusable Blocks were merged into Patterns, and a new pattern management screen was added to the site editor.

WordPress 6.4 will come with improvements to the pattern management in site editor.

You will now be able to add pattern categories when creating a new pattern.

The Pattern creation modal will look the same across WordPress.

Inside the Site Editor, the Patterns tab will now show your patterns organized in categories.

Open in New Tab in Link Preview

In the previous WordPress release, the link preview control (the popup that appears when you add a link in WordPress) moved the option to ‘Open in new tab’ under the Advanced toggle.

This meant that users were required a few extra clicks to open a link in a new tab.

Based on user feedback a new checkbox is added in the link preview modal allowing users to easily open a link in a new tab.

Under The Hood Changes

WordPress 6.4 also includes several changes intended for developers. Here are some of the most significant under-the-hood changes.

• TEMPLATEPATH and STYLESHEETPATH constants are deprecated.
• Framework to add revisions for post meta in WordPress.
• Theme developers can configure their own default min and max viewport widths for calculating fluid font sizes.
• A block hook field is added to block types.

We hope this article helped you discover what’s new in WordPress 6.4 and which new features to try out. We are particularly excited about all the changes to the site editor.