WordPress releases version 5.9: Joséphine

WordPress, which continues to lead the CMS market by a wide margin, has announced its new release, WordPress 5.9. Consistent with an almost twenty year tradition of naming major releases after jazz musicians, 5.9 honors the jazz singer and civil rights activist Joséphine Baker.

Among the enhancements announced with the new release are:

• Full site editing making it easier to edit WordPress themes without using code (only for themes that support the new feature).
• Ten new blocks for site editing listed under Themes (including next post, previous post, post comments, etc.).
• The opportunity to save theme changes for specific templates or globally across the whole site.
• A new default theme (named “Twenty Twenty-Two”).
• New ways to customize and configure blocks.

There are also some changes on the developer side. For example, theme.json now supports child themes allowing users to build themes in WordPress Admin without writing code.

Dig deeper: Looking to leave WordPress behind? You’re not alone

Why we care. If you’re a CMS user and you aren’t using WordPress at your current role, the chances are that you used it in your last role or will use it in your next. Its ubiquity makes changes relevant to almost all content creators. There’s nothing here as dramatic as the introduction of the block editor in WordPress 5.0, but there is a continuing trend of increasing the capabilities of no-code users.

Let’s also salute Ms. Baker. Not only a singer and an influential activist but an innovative dancer and an actress who never quite fulfilled her screen potential. Watch “Zouzou” (1934) if you ever get the chance.