What’s new in WordPress 6.0 “Arturo”?
Update 05/24/2022
WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” — named for Grammy-winning Latin jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill — was released on May 24, 2022, with nearly 1,000 enhancements and bug fixes, including style variations for block themes, block locking controls, and a smoother writing experience. WordPress has since moved on: the latest release is 7.0.2 (July 17, 2026), per the official release archive. The original 6.0 announcement is below:
Update 05/12/2022
Here’s a mere sampling of the many exciting changes that arrived with WordPress 6.0:
- Accessibility. The WordPress open-source software itself has received upgrades so that it’s easier to use overall.
- Block editor.
- Bundle multiple style variations for block themes.
- Create page content patterns that you can choose from to create your pages.
- New ancestor property in block.json. This will allow you to restrict where blocks may be placed.
- A new user interface will allow you to set a lock attribute for every block in the editor.
- Registration of blocks from within themes.
- Unrecognized content can now be preserved thanks to upgraded support.
- The Site Editor’s block-theme export feature also received several improvements.
- Block markup updates for image, quote, list, and group blocks.
- A new set of Post Comments blocks, No Results block, and more.
- Bootstrap/load. Skip unneeded queries by applying a do_parse_request filter.
- Cache API improvements. wp_cache_*_multiple is now full CRUD.
- Media. New filters and user interface additions.
- More dynamic hooks for custom post types
- Taxonomy improvements. Query caching, taxonomy query limits, navigation menu items, terminology changes, and more.
- Themes. Simpler pattern tools for theme authors, support for multiple theme.json files, improved theme exports from the Site Editor, and more.
- Users. Sites with particularly high traffic will now be able to query and count users.
- Updates for developers
WordPress 5.9 and full site editing
Just because something is already pretty great doesn’t mean that there isn’t ever room for further improvements and refinements. Take WordPress 5.9 for example. It was released back on January 25, 2022 — several major versions before today’s 7.0 branch — with a whole fleet of new features and refinements.
Dubbed “Joséphine,” the WordPress 5.9 release bounded forward with a number of updates intended to make the website creation and design experience much more friendly for end-users than any previous release. The hallmark features of Joséphine include:
- Full site editing controls when using a supported block-based theme
- Sitewide blocks that allow for additional customization
- Navigation blocks that allow for further flexibility with site menus
- The new, full site editing ready Twenty Twenty-Two theme
- Enhanced lazy loading performance for images
- Performance improvements to the Inserter, Block Themes, List View, and more
And yet, in early 2022, WordPress developers were already looking ahead to 6.0, and figuring out what new features it might boast. (WordPress 6.0 ultimately shipped on May 24, 2022.)
How WordPress 6.0 fit the Gutenberg roadmap
Early reports on WordPress 6.0 hinted at even bigger advances and refinements. In a January 26, 2022, blog post, Matías Ventura, an engineer and designer who was the lead architect of the Gutenberg block editor for WordPress and co-designer of the Twenty Eleven default theme, laid out a preliminary, high-level roadmap for the next steps and general scope for the new release.
“The overall aim is to consolidate and expand the set of customization tools introduced in 5.9 for creating themes with blocks, with a special focus towards usability and refinement,” Ventura said. “This new release could be considered a conceptual wrap for Gutenberg: Phase 2. This doesn’t mean the customization phase would be concluded with it, but that its main features would have been established.”
For those of you who aren’t aware, Gutenberg is the name given to the controversial yet revolutionary block editor that was introduced alongside the release of WordPress 5.0 in December 2018. The Gutenberg project’s goal is to help even the most novice, non-developer users easily create and manipulate content in a way that WordPress’ previous editor could not. Gutenberg allows for building and editing impressive, media-rich pages using movable block elements such as paragraphs, images, lists, galleries, videos, audio, and more.
The Gutenberg editor has three main components:
- Content: The content takes up most of the screen. You’ll see a visual preview of what everything should look like when a visitor is browsing your site. It’s not always 100% accurate, but the editor provides you with a rather good idea of the final layout.
- Top toolbar: The toolbar at the top helps you insert new blocks, undo or redo any edits you have made, and access other vital settings.
- Sidebar: The sidebar contains two tabs. The Post tab lets you configure post-level settings such as categories, tags, the featured image, etc. The Block tab shows the settings for whatever block that you have selected.
In his January 2022 roadmap, Ventura said the goal for WordPress 6.0 was to expand the existing tools that were introduced with the Gutenberg release and revisit some previously considered and shelved features.
A number of ideas were on the table at the time, and Ventura laid many of them out in his roadmap.
On top of the WordPress 6.0 roadmap, the Gutenberg project itself has its own development roadmap, broken down into four phases. They are:
- Easier Editing: Block-based content editing.
- Customization: FSE, block patterns, block directory, block themes, and global styles.
- Collaboration: Co-authoring content.
- Multilingual: Implementation of multilingual sites.
WordPress 6.0 marked the conceptual wrap of Phase 2, Customization, which culminated in WordPress 6.3 (2023) with the launch of the Site Editor. Today, Phase 3, Collaboration, is underway: asynchronous collaboration features landed in WordPress 6.9 in December 2025, per the core team’s Phase 3 update, and the official WordPress roadmap has WordPress 7.0 advancing collaboration features further.
What DreamHost expected from WordPress 6.0
In spring 2022, the future looked bright and full of possibilities for what these and further updates would offer WordPress users, according to Jason Cosper, the WordPress Product Advocate on the DreamPress team here at DreamHost.
“With Full Site Editing officially being released in WordPress 5.9, WordPress 6.0 looks to offer further refinements and improvements to the core site editing experience,” Cosper said ahead of the 6.0 release in spring 2022. “6.0 means that WordPress users will move ever closer to not even needing one of the popular page building plugins like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Divi.”
WordPress 6.0 release schedule
WordPress 6.0 followed the development and release schedule below, recorded in full on the WordPress core development blog.
- April 5, 2022: Live-streamed walkthrough (the same day, WordPress 5.9.3 shipped as a short-cycle maintenance release with 9 bug fixes in core and 10 in the block editor)
- April 12, 2022: Beta 1
- April 19, 2022: Beta 2
- April 26, 2022: Beta 3
- May 2, 2022: Beta 4
- May 3, 2022: Release candidate 1
- May 10, 2022: Release candidate 2
- May 17, 2022: Release candidate 3
- May 23, 2022: Dry run for release of WordPress 6.0 and 24-hour code freeze
- May 24, 2022: WordPress 6.0 is released
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