What’s new for developers? (April 2025)

April is bringing the latest, and only major WordPress release this year. One might wonder where it leaves these monthly roundups, but do not fret. This doesn’t mean development is stopping. Canonical plugins and individual components can be iterated and shipped independent of major releases, and we will be keeping an eye on those.

Slowing down could also allow more organic onboarding for new contributors, providing more space for learning and gaining confidence. Learn more about how you can get involved today!

Table of Contents

Highlights

WordPress 6.8 release

With just a few days away from 6.8 release, it’s good to pause with current projects and make sure you catch up on Dev notes, test all your themes and plugins against the new version, as well as all your client’s websites because you don’t want any surprises there.

If you find anything worth reporting, please do so. If you have nothing to test on but still want to find bugs, there are plenty of tickets waiting for a brave soul like yourself. For a more detailed guide on testing 6.8, refer to this beautiful writeup and weekly testing roundup.

The only major release in 2025

As already mentioned, WordPress 6.8 will be the only major release in 2025. This has been decided at a discussion which gathered almost 30 contributors, closest to the project’s development and release. Read more at Make Core announcement.

WordPress 6.8 Field Guide

The best way to stay informed about changes in every new release is still the Field Guide. Make sure you read it thoroughly so you don’t miss any of the great features and changes coming in 6.8.

Plugins & tools

Performance plugins workflows

The core performance team is changing the frequency and workflow of performance plugins releases. As a result, there is a new handbook page for the release workflow. Not just useful for all performance contributors, but for every plugin author, as a release checklist.

Design tools per block (6.8 edition)

Here’s a nice overview of all design tools per block so you can see which ones already exist and which ones will be ready to use with the latest WordPress version.

Plugin authors

If you are an author of plugins hosted at WordPress.org repo, be once again reminded to prepare your plugins for the new version. First and foremost, update the “Tested up to” value in your plugin’s readme.txt file to 6.8. It will help maintain the trust plugin users put into your plugins. For more details, refer to the email you received from the Release Squad [[email protected]], subject line including “WordPress 6.8 is imminent!”.

Themes

Notable block updates

The following are notable changes to blocks added in the past 30 days.

Block Library

April brings various updates to the Block library. Some are fine-tuning the details, like Heading, Search, and Tag Cloud blocks; while others might be more interesting to extenders, such as adding Interactivity support to Query Total block, control over rel attributes in RSS block, or enabling more formats in Details block. Navigation Link and Navigation Submenu blocks received some accessibility love, as well.

Heading: Add/correct typography examples (69812)
Tag Cloud: Remove unnecessary full-width padding (69725)
Query Total: Add interactivity.clientNavigation block support (69661)
RSS: Add option to open links in new tab/window and control rel attributes (69641)
Search: Fix: Background wrapper for ‘Button Inside’ option (69624)
Navigation: Add transparency slider for submenu background (69379)
Table of contents (experimental): Adding support for more granular controls (69063)
Details: Enable all non-interactive formats (68741)
Navigation Link, Navigation Submenu: Remove the title attribute controls (69689)

Block editor

While Inserter gets sort of make-up updates, setAttributes method gets real candy. It will support passing a pure function, which takes current attributes as its only argument and returns updated attributes. This method is helpful when you want to update a value based on a previous state or when working with objects and arrays.

Support passing updater function to setAttributes (69709)
Inserter: Remove truncation from media tab preview tooltips (69741)
Inserter: BlockPatternsExplorer: Hide scrollbar from sidebar if not scrollable (69706)

Packages

Format library got a real highlight effect with new alpha settings, while Media package was cleaned up from deprecated dependency.

Format Library: Add a feature to set alpha value to Highlight (67525)
Media: Remove @shopify/web-worker Dependency from packages/upload-media (69816)

For the full list of all Gutenberg changes in 6.8, refer to the Source of Truth (WordPress 6.8).

Resources

WordPress News

Props to@bph and @areziaal for reviewing this article and offering feedback.