WordPress 5.8 is on track to be released on the 20th of July and it contains a number of new features.
You can test WordPress 5.8 using a beta version on a staging site if you want to get used to the newer version of WordPress that will be released.
WordPress finally includes support for the WebP image format in version 5.8. The image quality that WordPress will use will be similar to JPG and PNG image formats which is set as 82%. In order to change the WebP image quality to 90% you can use the following code snippet.
Code snippets can be saved and executed on connected child sites using the code snippets extension.
Also in WordPress 5.8 the default for editing widgets in wp-admin will now use the block editor. If you would rather not use the block editor for editing widgets then you can use the following code snippet. Using the block editor for widgets the default load time in wp-admin will be increased by almost double the number of requests in wp-admin and can add up to 3 seconds of load time in wp-admin.
Full-site editing will also be coming to themes which do support it in WordPress 5.8. Two themes that should be supporting full-site editing will be Astra and the Kadence themes. A number of other themes will also be supporting FSE in upcoming versions. Block templates editor is also coming to WordPress 5.8 which means that create and use block templates on specific pages and posts on your site.
WordPress 5.8 includes a number of interesting features but due to the filters in WordPress core, you can always disable feature changes that you do not want to use for changing specific features in WordPress.
