WordPress 6.3 – What to Expect and How to Prepare

WordPress 6.3 planned for August 8, 2023 was the second major release in 2023. The WordPress 6.3 branch is open for tickets, proposals and discussions. Matias Ventura was the release lead for WordPress 6.3.

Live Product Demo for WP Release 6.3- Not to be Missed

Image credit – https://wordpress.org/news/2023/07/6-3-live-product-demo/

This WordPress release is fully packed with lots of exciting new features for developers and end-users. You really don’t want to miss out on this live product demo on Thursday, July 20, 2023 – by Rich Tabor and Anne McCarthy.

Sign up now for the live Product Demo

Changes scheduled for WordPress 6.3

Release 6.3 will literally be the beginning of the end of Gutenberg Phase 2. If you can get onto the Slack channel, you can’t help but feel the tangible excitement over all the design improvements being squeezed into this release, to improve user experience.

At the time of writing this post, there are 383 tickets on Trac that have been tagged for Version 6.3. This release is still in the early stages of planning, so it’s very likely that there will be quite a few additions or deletions to this list.

Here are some of the features that have been shortlisted for WordPress 6.3.

Command Palette : Gutenberg 15.6 launched an experimental ‘Command Center’ – primarily to allow users to move easily between different content types across the site. When it was time to integrate this into WordPress release 6.3, there was a lot of discussion over naming this area starting with Command Center – and then suggestions like WayFinder, Control Center, WordPress Explorer. ‘WayFinder’ was voted down primarily because it was hard to translate. The final term for this is the ‘Command Palette’.

Photo Credit : Uploaded by Joe Dolson as an attachment to Ticket 50523

• Design Improvements to the Image Editor : (Reference : Ticket 50523) The order of controls has been tweaked to make it more intuitive. Changes to the images can now be seen right away in the same screen so it is more WYSIWYG.
• Ability to retain custom templates and template parts across different themes : This one is really exciting because after this is implemented, you won’t have to worry about any custom parts that you may have painstakingly designed and want to retain, even after you change your WordPress theme.
• Enhancements to the Site Editor :
  • Ability to make changes to pages, navigation, and styles
  • Access Revisions across templates and styles
  • Ability to preview block themes before switching
  • Improvements to the user experience when the different components of the site editor are still loading
• Improvements to navigation
• Improvements to blocks
  • Adding new blocks – Footnotes, Details, Table of Contents
  • Enabling aspect ratio for visual image related blocks
  • Adding spacing presets to the spacer block (allowing theme authors better control over spacing across the theme)
• Improvements to patterns
  • Groundwork for reusable patterns
  • Add an option in the “Add a Page” modal popup to zoom out
  • Add a page with custom pattern inserter view
  • Ability to to find related patterns in the Inspector, when editing a template or template part
  • Update full screen modal dimensions, and pattern grids
• A command centre like tool to improve workflows and edit different parts of the website easily
• More options to manage fonts and Fonts API
• Ability to show no posts per page for custom posts : (Reference : Ticket #24142)
  • Some possible use cases that were discussed as part of this ticket
    • When all posts need to be hidden temporarily, while the site is under construction
    • When search results are shown within the header, and posts should not be displayed when the search bar is blank.
• Performance Improvements – 26 Tickets
• Ability to reset custom WP_Querys back to the original admin post using wp_rest_postdata(). (Reference : Ticket #18408)
• Updates to Simple Pie (Reference : Ticket 55604)
• Magic Method Updates to four WP classes need to be refactored for compatibility with PHP 8.2 (Reference : Ticket 56876)
• Deprecate the old Edit Media screen (Reference : Ticket 57612)
• Gutenberg Plugin updates: WordPress 6.2 had Gutenberg Version 14.2 to 15.1 included. So that involved integrating 9 plugin versions. According to the proposed schedule, WordPress 6.3 will include Gutenberg Version 16.1. As of writing this post, the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin is 15.9 released on May 31, 2023. More about all Gutenberg releases here.
• WordPress Compatibility issues with PHP Version 8.0 , 8.1 and 8.2
• Some more tickets that are early candidates for WordPress 6.3

WordPress 6.3 Milestones

Here’s the proposed schedule for the next WordPress release 6.3

Milestone	Date
Alpha Trunk open	March 9, 2023
Beta 1	June 27, 2023
Beta 2	July 3, 2023
Beta 3	July 11, 2023
Release Candidate 1	July 18, 2023
Release Candidate 2	July 25, 2023
Release Candidate 3	August 1, 2023
Dry Run	August 7, 2023
Go live	August 8, 2023

However, as is obvious, you should not use the beta versions directly on your live websites. These beta releases are strictly for you to test, prepare and play around with it on your staging sites – while also doing your basic civic duty by reporting any bugs that you might notice.

If you aren’t sure how to go about setting up a staging site, you could contact your hosting provider for help.

If you notice errors and need to trouble-shoot, you could use the WordPress logs on your website, to find out what’s causing it.

WordPress 6.3 Product Walkthrough

If you are curious about what’s coming in WordPress 6.3 or would like to share feedback, you might want to listen in to the Product Walk-through (scheduled date not yet announced).

Recommended Reading for WordPress 6.1

• Phase 2 – Finale (WordPress 6.2 and 6.3) – Published by Matias Ventura [February 4, 2023]
• Phase 3 : Collaboration (Not included in WP 6.3) – Published by Matias Ventura [March 24, 2023]
• All discussions on WordPress Core about Version 6.3
• All posts tagged 6.3
• WordPress 6.3 Development Cycle
• WP 6.3 Pre-planning post
• Roadmap to WordPress 6.3
• Main tasks – Gutenberg Phase 2
• Design Board for Gutenberg Phase 2
• WP 6.3 Design Changes
• Design Kickoff post by Tammie Lister
• What’s new for Developers – July 2023 – by Justin Tadlock

In Conclusion

The next WordPress release in 2024 is WordPress 6.5 on March 26, 2024.

Photo Credits : Image by 政徳 吉田 from Pixabay