Joséphine- WordPress 5.9

Joséphine- WordPress 5.9

WordPress 5.9 “Joséphine”  released on January 25, 2022, is a major WordPress core release. The release was named in honor of acclaimed international jazz singer Joséphine Baker. Baker, a lifelong civil rights campaigner, believed that all people could live in harmony together, in the same way as different instruments in a jazz band blend together to make a whole piece.

Our new version of WordPress includes 3 types of themes, Classical (what we have used so far), Hybrid and Block. The beauty about the new themes is that they include Full Site Editing (FSE) using the WordPress block editor.

WordPress has always been about democratization. These new features enable us to easily add features like colors, fonts, layouts and templates easily to our posts and pages without being a coder.

The release also includes the new Twenty Twenty-Two block theme. The WordPress 5.9 welcome screen says:

“This is more than just a new default theme. It’s a brand-new way to work with WordPress themes. Block themes put a wide array of visual choices in your hands, from color schemes and typeface combinations to page templates and image filters — all together, in the site editing interface. By making changes in one place, you can give Twenty Twenty-Two the same look and feel as your brand or other websites — or take your site’s look in another direction.”

There are are 99 features and 100 bugs fixed in the new WordPress 5.9. From an SEO perspective, one of the items that I am excited about is lazy loading. Up until now lazy loading images in WordPress slowed down the page instead of speading it up. I see that this has been repaired and look forward to trying it out!

The hosting companies are testing out the new version of WordPress and should be releasing it as soon as they have determined that it is stable. If you already see the WordPress 5.9 update, please remember to back up your site before you run the update!