Still seeing WordPress 6.4 described as an upcoming release? It isn’t. WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” was released on November 7, 2023. Named for jazz singer Shirley Horn, it was the 48th major release of WordPress and the third and final major release of 2023. WordPress has since moved on: the current line is WordPress 7.0, with version 7.0.4 released on August 12, 2026.
The release’s development cycle kicked off on June 5, 2023, and its feature roadmap followed on August 22, 2023. Not everything on that roadmap made the final cut, so here’s what WordPress 6.4 actually shipped, starting with its new default theme at the time, Twenty Twenty-Four.
Twenty Twenty-Four: a new default theme
Twenty Twenty-Four was built to fit almost any kind of site. Instead of a single motif, the design team worked from three use cases: entrepreneurs and small businesses, photographers and artists, and writers and bloggers. Under the hood it’s a collection of templates and patterns — over 35 of them in the shipped version — including Home templates plus pages like About, project summaries, RSVPs, and landing pages.
Twenty Twenty-Four pairs Cardo headlines (a serif from Google Fonts) with a sans-serif system font for body copy. The default palette is light, with a dark style variation that keeps the same typography, plus two all-sans-serif variations: one light, one dark.
As a block theme, it works with all the site editor tools, and it surfaced newer design options like the details block and vertical text. It also leans on complete page patterns and template variations, so you don’t have to build pages from scratch. Twenty Twenty-Four has since passed the torch: Twenty Twenty-Five became the default theme with WordPress 6.7 in November 2024.
What shipped in WordPress 6.4
WordPress 6.4 was a refinement release, not a reinvention. In the official release announcement, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy said many of 6.4’s features and enhancements “fall in the ‘small but mighty’ category.” Here’s what landed.
Image lightbox
WordPress 6.4 added a native lightbox: click an image and it opens full-screen, no gallery plugin required. You can switch it on globally or enable it only for specific images.
Block Hooks
The roadmap’s “auto-insert blocks” exploration shipped under the name Block Hooks. It lets plugin developers automatically insert dynamic blocks at specific content locations — install a membership plugin, for example, and it can offer a login/logout link in your navigation. While Block Hooks is considered a developer tool, you keep complete control to add, dismiss, and customize auto-inserted blocks.
Pattern categories, filtering, and sharing
Building on WordPress 6.3’s ability to create patterns directly in the editor, 6.4 added custom pattern categories and filtering in the inserter’s Patterns section. Patterns also became portable: export them as JSON files from the Site Editor’s patterns view and import them anywhere. If you build client sites, that turns a one-off pattern into a reusable library you can carry between projects.
A redesigned Command Palette
First introduced in WordPress 6.3, the Command Palette (⌘+K on Mac, Ctrl+K on Windows) got a refreshed design in 6.4, plus new commands for block-specific actions.
Writing and List View improvements
List View got the most day-to-day useful upgrades: custom names for Group blocks (no more scanning a sidebar of identical “Group” entries), image previews for Gallery and Image blocks, and new keyboard shortcuts. The release also brought smarter list merging, better control over link settings, and a consistent toolbar for the Navigation, List, and Quote blocks.
More design tools
Design tooling grew as well. Group blocks now accept background images, so a simple textured section no longer calls for a Cover block workaround; image dimensions stay consistent with placeholder aspect ratios; and you can add buttons to the Navigation block without writing code.
What didn’t make it into 6.4
Three new blocks were considered during the 6.4 cycle (Table of Contents, Time to Read, and Scrolling Marquee), but none of them shipped in the release. Time to Read eventually arrived in core with WordPress 6.9 on December 2, 2025; Table of Contents and Scrolling Marquee still aren’t core blocks. Font customization missed the cut as well: the Font Library shipped with WordPress 6.5 “Regina” on April 2, 2024, a release that also completed revisions for templates and template parts.
Performance, accessibility, and other changes
WordPress was already the most widely used CMS in the world when 6.4 shipped, and it still is: WordPress runs 40.8% of all websites as of August 2026, per W3Techs. Some of the release’s most valuable work was the least flashy kind.
Performance wins
WordPress 6.4 included more than 100 performance-related updates, on the heels of WordPress 6.3’s 170+ performance updates. The 6.4 batch focused on faster template loading for themes (including Twenty Twenty-Four), the “defer” and “async” script-loading strategies in core, blocks, and themes, and trimming autoloaded options.
Accessibility highlights
WordPress 6.3 logged more than 50 accessibility improvements, and 6.4 kept the streak going: List View refinements, aria-label support for the Navigation block, and admin interface touch-ups like better button placement.
Other notable changes
Two practical notes for anyone who ran the update. WordPress recommended PHP 8.1 or 8.2 for the 6.4 release. And attachment pages were fully disabled for new installations: instead of generating a thin page for every uploaded file (pages search engines sometimes indexed, to nobody’s benefit), new sites redirect those URLs to the file itself. Existing sites kept attachment pages on upgrade, controllable via the wp_attachment_pages_enabled option.
Forward-thinking leadership
Harkening back to WordPress 5.6, “Simone” — released December 8, 2020, and built by an all-women and non-binary identifying release squad — WordPress 6.4 was led by an underrepresented-gender release squad.
A 20th-anniversary release
WordPress 6.4 was the final major release of 2023, a year that marked the 20th anniversary of the first version of WordPress, which debuted on May 27, 2003. (The jazz nicknames came slightly later: WordPress 1.0 “Davis,” honoring Miles Davis, arrived on January 3, 2004.) Version 6.4 was the 48th major release of WordPress, and its open-source structure and collaborative spirit have kept it evolving ever since.
Where does WordPress 6.4 stand today?
Six major releases have shipped since “Shirley”: 6.5 through 6.9, then WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” on May 20, 2026. As of August 2026, the current version is 7.0.4, released on August 12, 2026. The official release archive is blunt about older branches: only the most recent release in the 7.0 series is “safe to use and actively maintained.” Recent older branches do still see point releases (6.9.7 landed the same day as 7.0.4), but if a site you manage is still running 6.4, treat the upgrade as overdue — back up, update from Dashboard → Updates, and test.
DreamHost WordPress hosting plans provide access to current WordPress versions in the control panel and include daily automated backups. You’ll still want to check plugin and theme compatibility and test major updates before pushing them to a live site.
