WordPress 5.8 template editor and WebP images

[SenseiSteve]

WordPress 5.8 shipped with a new template editor and added the ability to upload WebP images. How do you think this will compete with Elementor, WPBakery, Visual Composer and other design programs? And will designers convert to WebP or continue to use existing compression short term?

 

[bigredseo]

For all the fanfare WordPress 5.8 got, the bulk of their more than 300 edits/updates were focused on Gutenberg and the new template system. And, in some ways, why shouldn't it - that's the direction they've been headed for a while.

I have mixed feelings on the release as WordPress, from the very early days of Gutenberg, said they were not going into the page building market, but here they are.

All that said, Gutenberg is still very much a feature lacking rollout, when you compare it to Divi, Elementor and others. I don't think you'll find any designers swapping to Gutenberg any time soon.

Personally, I wish they would have kept the page building tool as a plugin and not built into the CMS, but that's just my own thing.

As far as WebP, this is something people should have been using for at least the last 5 years, and could easily be implemented using Plugins or 3rd party services. Allowing people to upload WebP images is nice, I just hope people remember to also upload their JPGs for places like Social Sharing which, while they do use WebP themselves, they're still used to seeing JPG/PNG as the featured image in the share screen.

For us, we've used the "Picture srcset" which allows you to define different size images, and WebP if the browser supports it. There's really no reason why that shouldn't still be the standard.

 

[John @ S4]

There is one feature in 5.8 that makes a real change in the way that people can use it to build pages or widgets, that is much more significant that most of the other stuff, and that is the 'query loop' block.

It's the first time that you have been able to create custom loops to display filtered post, and to have a reasonable amount of control over how they are displayed, without either sing a third-party plugin or writing a little bit of php/html.

It's not the most polished implementation possibly, but it is a potentially big thing that eliminates something that a lot of people would have previously turned to a pagebuilder for.

 

[bigredseo]

There is one feature in 5.8 that makes a real change in the way that people can use it to build pages or widgets, that is much more significant that most of the other stuff, and that is the 'query loop' block.

That's in the Block Editor section right? Gutenberg related?

I'm in the process of building out a Gutenberg Only version of one of my sites for development (I still live and die in the functions file creating shortcodes etc).

I did like the addition they're making for CSS in that only the css that is on the page is called. The idea being, you'd replace big sections of the style.css and instead load it directly within a block.

Of course, I can see this getting out of control as someone may use a block on several pages, and the CSS is then triplicated, but hopefully, there'll be some safeguards for that at some point.

 

[John @ S4]

That's in the Block Editor section right? Gutenberg related?

Yep, exactly. It's a bit limited, you are still going to need to write a custom loop to do anything particularly clever, but it does give the chance to filter posts by category, change display order, etc.

Query Loop Block

Go back to the list of Blocks The Query Loop block is an advanced block that allows you to display posts based on specified parameters, like a PHP loop without the code. You can think of it as a more complex and powerful Latest Posts Block. With various block patterns integrated into the block...

wordpress.org