WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza”

Posted by: mwhite - Posted on:

Meet “Esperanza”, the first WordPress release of 2021. “Esperanza” is named in honor of Esperanza Spalding, a modern musical prodigy. Her path as a musician is varied and inspiring—learn more about her and give her music a listen!

With this new version, WordPress brings you fresh colors. The editor helps you work in a few places you couldn’t before without getting into code or hiring a pro. The controls you use most are right where you need them. Layout changes that should be simple, are even simpler to make.

Now the new editor is easier to use

Font-size adjustment in more places: now, font-size controls are right where you need them in the List and Code blocks. No more trekking to another screen to make that single change!

Reusable blocks: several enhancements make reusable blocks more stable and easier to use. And now they save automatically with the post when you click the Update button.

Inserter drag-and-drop: drag blocks and block patterns from the inserter right into your post.

You can do more without writing custom code

Full-height alignment: have you ever wanted to make a block, like the Cover block, fill the whole window? Now you can.

Buttons block: now you can choose a vertical or a horizontal layout. And you can set the width of a button to a preset percentage.

Social Icons block: now you can change the size of the icons.

A simpler default colour palette

This new streamlined color palette collapses all the colors that used to be in the WordPress source code down to seven core colors and a range of 56 shades that meet the WCAG 2.0 AA recommended contrast ratio against white or black.

Find the new palette in the default WordPress Dashboard color scheme, and use it when you’re building themes, plugins, or any other components. For all the details, check out the Color Palette dev note.

Lazy-load your iFrames

Now it’s simple to let iframes lazy-load. By default, WordPress will add a loading="lazy" attribute to iframe tags when both width and height are specified.