What can we expect to see in WordPress 6.7?

The 16^th of July release of WordPress 6.6 “Dorsey” saw a plethora of handy features and updates including a new publishing flow, the ability to rollback auto-updates, support for more style variations and lots more.  

What can we expect from WordPress 6.7 and when can we expect it? 

Potential release date 

There are multiple phases to WordPress releases and from what we gather, the tentative timeline for the release phases looks like this: 

• Beta 1 – 1^st of October 
• Beta 2 – 8^th of October 
• Beta 3 – 15^th of October 
• WordPress 6.7 General Release – 12^th of November 

The upcoming WordPress version will have beta access from as early as the 1^st of October and is pipped for general release on the 12^th of November, this year.  

Like any rough release timeframes, the above dates are not final and could be liable to change. 

Summary of features 

Key Media Improvements 

• HEIC Support – Since 2017, HEIC has been the standard image format for Apple users globally. Adding support for HEIC results in fewer headaches for Apple device users needing to convert their images to a supported file format. As browser support for HEIC is rather scarce, WordPress will automatically convert HEIC files to JPG where available. 

• Auto sizes for Lazy Load Images  – Adds ‘auto’ to the beginning of the sizes attribute for any image that is being lazy loaded. 

Design Updates 

• New default theme – WordPress 6.7 introduces TwentyTwentyFive as the default theme. 

• Updates to design tools – Almost all blocks are inline to receive updates to support border colour and more. 

• New font size presets – The styles interface introduces an improved feature for editing, creating, removing, and applying font size presets. 

Security 

Much like other WordPress releases, one of the main focuses will be enhanced security and patching any pesky bugs that are currently present or arise before the general release.   

WordPress 6.6 was released on the 16^th of July, and we have already seen a minor update released (WordPress 6.1.1) on the 23^rd of July to address bugs, so we know this is a priority for them. 

UI & UX Enhancements  

WordPress 6.5 included an overhauled editor interface, which helped simplify the content creation process and add more useful tools.  

We expect WordPress to continue building on this and make further UI & UX enhancements. 

Performance Optimisation 

With every release, WordPress will implement as many performance and page load speed enhancements as they can.  

We foresee further enhancements in this sector by offering more efficient resource management and improvements to core functionality. 

Extensibility Support 

WordPress is renowned for being the most extensible, malleable and customisable website content management system around.  

Previous updates have seen enhancements to plugin and theme APIs, and we anticipate further updates to improve support for third-party services via the REST API.