1. 5.3
A glimpse into the next major WordPress Release
24 Oct 2019

2. Edmund Chan
edmund@nerb.com.sg //
www.edmundcwm.com
Developer

3. WordPress 5.3
• Scheduled release date - 12 November 2019
• Current Release - Release Candidate 2
• What to expect
– Block editor new features and improvements
– New default theme
– Admin UI enhancements
– and more…

4. Block Editor
• Twelve plugin version releases to be merged (v5.4
- 6.5)
• 1.5s reduction in load time for a sizeable post(36k
words, 1k blocks)

5. Block Editor
• New
– Group Block
• Improvements
– Column Block
– Image Block
– Table Block
– Button Block
and more…

6. Block Editor
• Group Block
– Allows nesting of inner blocks
– Aligning of child blocks
– Provides wide and full-width settings

7. Block Editor
• Column Block
– New width settings
– Layout selector

8. Block Editor
• Image Block
– New ‘Circle Mask’ style

9. Block Editor
• Table Block
– Support ‘Headers’ and ‘Footers’
– Text alignment support
– Colors

10. Block Editor
• Button Block
– Support ‘Border Radius’
– Support ‘Target’

11. TwentyTwenty

12. TwentyTwenty
• Focuses on clarity and readability
– New open source typeface - Inter

13. TwentyTwenty

14. TwentyTwenty
• Full support for the Block editor

15. TwentyTwenty
• Custom Colors

16. TwentyTwenty
• Cover template

17. TwentyTwenty
• Menus

18. Admin Enhancements
• Big image uploads
– Automatically detect large images and generate a “web-
optimized maximum size” (default size is 2560px)
– Original image will still be stored but not used
– Uploads will be resumed when they fail
– Always best to crop and optimise before upload!
• Image rotation
– Correctly rotated according to EXIF orientation metadata

19. Admin Enhancements
• Admin email notification
– Prompt to verify admin email after logging in if account hasn’t
been active in awhile

20. Admin Enhancements
• Show/hide password toggle
– Available on WP login screens for both mobile and desktop

21. Admin Enhancements
• Design and UI
– Improved color contrasts for form fields and buttons
Source - wpbeginner

22. Developers
• Code Modernisation
– Full support for PHP 7.4 (release end Nov)
– Use of the spread operator (…$args)
– Developers to update their code if applicable
• Date/Time component fixes
– More reliable and easy to work with date and time components
– Includes new functions like current_datetime(),
get_post_datetime()
– Presentation: How WordPress breaks time

23. Developers
• WP REST API
– Performance increase(30%-40%) in large API responses
– _fields param now supports nested fields e.g.,
wp-json/wp/v2/posts?_fields=title.rendered

24. Developers
• Search Engine Indexing
– Method used to discourage indexing will change
– Remove previously added ‘Disallow: /‘ in robots.txt
– Updated robots meta tag <meta name=‘robots’
content=‘noindex,nofollow’ />
– Will exclude indexing and further crawling

25. What’s next
• Test it out
– Install and activate the ‘WordPress Beta Tester’ plugin
– Tools > Beta Testing > Check Bleeding edge nightlies option
– Dashboard > Updates > Update Now
• Read more
– WordPress 5.3 Field Guide

26. Edmund Chan
edmund@nerb.com.sg //
www.edmundcwm.com
Developer