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WordPress 5.4 “Adderley”

Here it is! Named “Adderley” in honor of Nat Adderley, the latest and greatest version of WordPress is available for download or update in your dashboard.

Welcome to WordPress 5.4

Every major release adds more to the block editor.

More ways to make posts and pages come alive with your best images. More ways to bring your visitors in, and keep them engaged, with the richness of embedded media from the web’s top services.

More ways to make your vision real, and put blocks in the perfect place—even if a particular kind of block is new to you. More efficient processes.

And more speed everywhere, so as you build sections or galleries, or just type in a line of prose, you can feel how much faster your work flows.

Two new blocks. And better blocks overall.

• Two brand-new blocks: Social Icons and Buttons make adding interactive features fast and easy.
• New ways with color: Gradients in the Buttons and Cover block, toolbar access to color options in Rich Text blocks, and for the first time, color options in the Group and Columns blocks.
• Guess a whole lot less! Version 5.4 streamlines the whole process for placing and replacing multimedia in every block. Now it works the same way in almost every block!
• And if you’ve ever thought your image in the Media+Text block should link to something else—perhaps a picture of a brochure should download that brochure as a document? Well, now it can.

Cleaner UI, clearer navigation—and easier tabbing!

• Clearer block navigation with block breadcrumbs. And easier selection once you get there.
• For when you need to navigate with the keyboard, better tabbing and focus. Plus, you can tab over to the sidebar of nearly any block.
• Speed! 14% faster loading of the editor, 51% faster time-to-type!
• Tips are gone. In their place, a Welcome Guide window you can bring up when you need it—and only when you need it—again and again.
• Know at a glance whether you’re in a block’s Edit or Navigation mode. Or, if you have restricted vision, your screen reader will tell you which mode you’re in.

Of course, if you want to work with the very latest tools and features, install the Gutenberg plugin. You’ll get to be the first to use new and exciting features in the block editor before anyone else has seen them!

Your fundamental right: privacy

5.4 helps with a variety of privacy issues around the world. So when users and stakeholders ask about regulatory compliance, or how your team handles user data, the answers should be a lot easier to get right.

Take a look:

• Now personal data exports include users session information and users location data from the community events widget. Plus, a table of contents!
• See progress as you process export and erasure requests through the privacy tools.
• Plus, little enhancements throughout give the privacy tools a little cleaner look. Your eyes will thank you!

Just for developers

Add custom fields to menu items—natively

Two new actions let you add custom fields to menu items—without a plugin and without writing custom walkers.

On the Menus admin screen, wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields fires just before the move buttons of a nav menu item in the menu editor.

In the Customizer, wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields_customize_template fires at the end of the menu-items form-fields template.

Check your code and see where these new actions can replace your custom code, and if you’re concerned about duplication, add a check for the WordPress version.

Blocks! Simpler styling, new APIs and embeds

• Radically simpler block styling. Negative margins and default padding are gone! Now you can style blocks the way you need them. And, a refactor got rid of four redundant wrapper divs.
• If you build plugins, now you can register collections of your blocks by namespace across categories—a great way to get more brand visibility.
• Let users do more with two new APIs: block variations and gradients.
• In embeds, now the block editor supports TikTok—and CollegeHumor is gone.

There’s lots more for developers to love in WordPress 5.4. To discover more and learn how to make these changes shine on your sites, themes, plugins and more, check the WordPress 5.4 Field Guide.

The Squad

This release was led by Matt Mullenweg, Francesca Marano, and David Baumwald. They were enthusiastically supported by a release squad:

• Editor Tech: Jorge Filipe Costa (@jorgefelipecosta)
• Editor Design: Mark Uraine (@mapk)
• Core Tech: Sergey Biryukov (@sergeybiryukov)
• Design: Tammie Lister (@karmatosed)
• Docs Coordinator: JB Audras (@audrasjb)
• Docs & Comms Wrangler: Mary Baum (@marybaum)

The squad was joined throughout the release cycle by 552 generous volunteer contributors who collectively worked on 361 tickets on Trac and 1226 pull requests on GitHub.

Put on a Nat Adderley playlist, click that update button (or download it directly), and check the profiles of the fine folks that helped:

Many thanks to all of the community volunteers who contribute in the support forums. They answer questions from people across the world, whether they are using WordPress for the first time or since the first release. These releases are more successful for their efforts!

Finally, thanks to all the community translators who worked on WordPress 5.4. Their efforts bring WordPress fully translated to 46 languages at release time, with more on the way.

If you want to learn more about volunteering with WordPress, check out Make WordPress or the core development blog.