WordPress 6.5 – What to Expect and How to Prepare

WordPress 6.5 planned for March 26, 2024 will be the first major WordPress release this year.

Matt Mullenweg is the release lead for WordPress 6.5. Here’s a complete list of all the team leads for WordPress 6.5.

Proposed Changes for WordPress 6.5

There are 419 tickets on Trac that have been tagged for Version 6.5, as of February 10, 2024. Of which, 6 issues are high priority, 408 issues are normal and 5 issues are low priority.

Some of the most exciting features proposed for WordPress 6.5 –

• Custom Fields – This would mean users could display data stored in custom fields on blocks. Very interesting. Will update this when we have more details.
• New Font Library – The Font Library is a ‘Media library’ for fonts. Just like ‘Media library’, this helps you to install and manage fonts across your website, irrespective of what themes you have installed or activated. This features allows users to install, uninstall, activate and de-activate local fonts and Google fonts. This font manager feature was supposed to be part of WordPress 6.4, and was in fact part of the WP 6.4 Beta 1 release, as well, but a decision was made to move it to WordPress 6.5 on October 5, 2023. This feature is included in Gutenber 16.7, released on September 27, 2023.
• Merging the plugin Performant Translations into WordPress core. Over 3000 live websites are using this plugin, as of writing this post. Pascal Bircher proposed including it in core, due to the tremendous amount of performance benefits it can lead to, for all WordPress websites. The bulk of the work has been done, so it seems highly likely that this will be part of WordPress 6.5.

WordPress 6.5 Milestones

Here’s the proposed schedule for the next WordPress release 6.5

Milestone	Date
Alpha Trunk open	October 17, 2023
Beta 1	February 13, 2024
Beta 2	February 20, 2024
Beta 3	February 27, 2024
Release Candidate 1	5 March, 2024
Release Candidate 2	12 March, 2024
Release Candidate 3	19 March, 2024
Dry Run	25 March, 2024
Go live	26 March, 2024

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 6.5 Product Walkthrough

If you are curious about what’s coming in WordPress 6.5 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 6.5

• December 7, 2023. The road towards WordPress 6.5. By Rich Tabor
• December 8, 2023. Roadmap to 6.5. By Anne
• WordPress 6.5 Development Cycle
• WordPress 6.5 Release Parties Schedule

In Conclusion

WordPress Release 6.5 is still in the early stages, so this post will be updated regularly, as we get closer to the release date.

Photo Credits : Image by 政徳 吉田 from Pixabay