The wait is over! WordPress 5.5 Beta 1 is available for testing.
If you have any test site then you can check the features of the new version. As it has not been officially released, it will cause issues if you install it in a production site.
At this phase, Beta testers will play a huge role as the official release is scheduled to be on August 11, 2020. You can be one of the contributors if you know about coding.
WordPress 5.5 Beta 1 Features
WordPress 5.5 has added the following features:
XML SiteMaps
Auto-updates
Lazy-Loading Images
Better Accessibility
Improvements in Blocks
Inline Image Editing
The image blocks will be provided with an option to zoom, crop, and rotate photos inline.
Block Patterns
There will be additional block patterns useful to create different pages.
Device Previews
Now you can have a look at the preview of the content in various devices before publishing the content.
Improvements in Editing
The editing experience will be improved as you will see the changes in the drag and drop interface. There will be a dedicated parent block section as well as multiple selections of blocks. Furthermore, it will help to relocate blocks for better performance.
With this version, themes will contain an extended toolset useful for making designs. The new version makes it easier to add gradients and backgrounds to groups, columns, and other blocks as well. There are different types of measurements except for pixels like ems, rems, vh, vw, percentage, etc. Now WordPress will support all these measurements.
The new block directory will also be useful to use third party blocks directly from the Gutenberg editor. It will display categories and collections smoothly.
There will be several other features related to advanced redirection during 404 errors, external libraries.
Conclusion
WordPress 5.5 Beta 1 will be improved and WordPress 5.5 release date is on August 11, 2020. Stay updated with the latest version of WordPress.