WordPress 6.8 “Cecil”, the only major release of 2025, has finally arrived. This version brings style book support to classic themes, numerous editor improvements, speculative loading, bcrypt password hashing, and much more.
New Features and Changes in WordPress 6.8
Design Updates
Stylebook support for classic themes
The style book is available for classic themes that have enabled editor styles via add_theme_support( 'editor-styles' ) or have a theme.json file.
Now taking the Twenty Twenty One theme as an example, here’s how the Appearance menu is on WordPress 6.7.
Now the same theme on WordPress 6.8 will have a slightly different submenu.
As we can see, there’s a new “Design” tab with beta 1 of WordPress 6.8 and the patterns menu has also been removed. Now from the upcoming WordPress version, if a classic theme has style book support enabled, the patterns option will be available by accessing the “Design” tab.
Now the style book can be accessed by selecting the “Styles” option.
New color control reset button
With this enhancement, resetting the text or background colors takes one step less. Now users can reset the colors without actually opening the concerned tab selecting the color picker and clicking on the reset button.
A new quick reset button has been added and will be there by default from WordPress 6.8.
Zoom-out mode enhancements
Now in the zoom-out mode, users can shuffle styles from the toolbar as a new icon has been added for it.
Improved font family preview
This enhancement in WordPress 6.8 will now provide a preview of all the fonts in the font picker window in the Global Styles.
This is how the font family drop-down menu is in WordPress 6.7.
But from WordPress 6.8 onwards, we can see the font preview in the drop-down itself.
Block updates
Query loop block
The query loop has received various enhancements such as fixing an issue with sticky post, a new ignore option for sticky posts, and a depth limit option. Besides this, the redundant sticky state in the Query Loop block has been removed.
Image block
The image block toolbar from WordPress 6.8 will have a new option to define the selected image to be used as the featured image.
Data Views enhancements
The properties tab has received a few changes such as a new lock button next to the “Title” menu in the three available layouts (Table, Grid, and List view). Besides this, a new icon can be seen for the hide status function.
A new confirmation dialogue box has been added in data views for the “Permanently delete” option.
A new density option has been added to the table layout.
A new badge component has also been added for synced patterns.
Miscellaneous changes
UI update for starter patterns
You will notice the UI update if Starter Patterns are available when adding a new page. If they are present, clicking “Add New Page” will open the screen with the pattern inserter already active.
Block type badges
To make it easier to identify renamed blocks, a new block-type badge will appear while the renamed block is being edited.
Here’s how it is now.
Dashboard label update
In the beta version of WordPress 6.8, we can spot a label change in the Posts and Pages sections.
We can see two changes here:
- “Add New Post” > “Add Post”
- “Add New Page” > “Add Page”
Here’s the “Posts” section in WordPress 6.7 for reference.
Now here’s how it is in the beta version.
API improvements
For WordPress 6.8, work is progressing on the Block Hooks API, HTML API, and also a new withSyncEvent() function in Interactivity API.
Implementing bcrypt for password hashing
In terms of security, the biggest update is the adoption of bcrypt which will replace the current phpass portable hashing system. This adoption finally marks the closure of a Trac ticket, opened 13 years ago by Thorsten (th23), who first suggested this change.
Speculative Loading in core
With the launch of WordPress 6.8, Speculative Loading will be a part of the Core. The feature has been used so far with the help of the Speculative Loading plugin. By implementing it into the core, this feature will improve page load times greatly.
Internationalization improvements
Several improvements such as localized PHPMailer messages, Plugin update emails in the admin’s locale, and more set to arrive with WordPress 6.8.
More efficient block-type registration
A new function wp_register_block_types_from_metadata_collection() will be introduced and will allow plugins to register multiple block types with a single call.
Wrapping up
This is the only major WordPress release of the year, with minor updates to follow as needed. However, Gutenberg releases remain unaffected.