WordPress full changelog

WordPress 6.8.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. More maintenance releases will be made available throughout 2025.

WordPress 6.8 polishes and refines the tools that you use every day, making your site faster, more secure, and easier to manage. The Style Book now has a structured layout and works with Classic themes, giving you more control over global styles. Speculative loading speeds up navigation by preloading links before users navigate to them, bcrypt hashing strengthens password security automatically, and database optimizations improve performance.
The Style Book has a new, structured layout and clearer labels, to make it even easier to edit colors, typography—almost all your site styles—in one place.
Plus, now you can see it in Classic themes that have editor-styles or a theme.json file. Find the Style Book under Appearance > Design and use it to preview your theme’s evolution, as you edit CSS or make changes in the Customizer.
Editor improvements:
Easier ways to see your options in Data Views, and you can exclude sticky posts from the Query Loop. Plus, you’ll find lots of little improvements in the editor that smooth your way through everything you build.
Near-instant page loads, thanks to Speculative Loading:
In WordPress 6.8, pages load faster than ever. When you or your user hovers over or clicks a link, WordPress may preload the next page, for a smoother, near-instant experience. The system balances speed and efficiency, and you can control how it works, with a plugin or your own code. This feature only works in modern browsers—older ones will simply ignore it without any impact.
Stronger password security with bcrypt:
Now passwords are harder to crack with bcrypt hashing, which takes a lot more computing power to break. This strengthens overall security, as do other encryption improvements across WordPress. You don’t need to do anything—everything updates automatically.
Accessibility improvements:
100+ accessibility fixes and enhancements touch a broad spectrum of the WordPress experience. This release includes fixes to every bundled theme,

WordPress 6.8 Beta 3 contains more than 3 Editor updates and fixes since the Beta 2 release, including 16 tickets for WordPress core.

This minor release features 16 bug fixes throughout Core and the Block Editor. WordPress 6.7.1 is a fast-follow release with a strict focus on bugs introduced in WordPress 6.7.

Conditionalise metaboxes based on Zoom Out (#66742)
Block toolbar: restrict visible child calculation to known blocks (#66702)
Optimize getVisibleElementBounds in scrollable cases (#66546)

The following core tickets from Trac are fixed:
All links underlined due to CSS specificity bump for top-level element-only selectors.
is_utf8_charset() undefined when called by code in compat.php (causes a fatal error).
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Object of class WP_Comment could not be converted to string.
Update the $_old_files array for 6.6 (which caused security plugins to flag the files).
Toolbar: consider moving user menu to a higher priority (after most plugins).
Layout: Invalid CSS for nested fullwidth layouts with zeroed-out custom padding.
Classic Editor Category metabox shows all categories, without scrolling.
The following block editor issues from GitHub are fixed:
Elements: Avoid specificity bump for top-level element-only selectors.
Navigation block: Allow themes to override block library text-decoration rule.
Fix invalid css for nested fullwidth layouts with zero padding applied.
Prevent empty void at the bottom of editor when block directory results are present.
Pattern overrides: Ensure “Reset” button always shows as last item and with border.
Global Styles: Disable “Reset styles” button when there are no changes.
Fix: Removed shuffle button when only 1 pattern is present.
fix: wp icon focus issue.
useBlockElement: return null until ref callback has time to clean up the old element.

The following core tickets from Trac are fixed:
All links underlined due to CSS specificity bump for top-level element-only selectors.
is_utf8_charset() undefined when called by code in compat.php (causes a fatal error).
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Object of class WP_Comment could not be converted to string.
Update the $_old_files array for 6.6 (which caused security plugins to flag the files).
Toolbar: consider moving user menu to a higher priority (after most plugins).
Layout: Invalid CSS for nested fullwidth layouts with zeroed-out custom padding.
Classic Editor Category metabox shows all categories, without scrolling.
The following block editor issues from GitHub are fixed:
Elements: Avoid specificity bump for top-level element-only selectors.
Navigation block: Allow themes to override block library text-decoration rule.
Fix invalid css for nested fullwidth layouts with zero padding applied.
Prevent empty void at the bottom of editor when block directory results are present.
Pattern overrides: Ensure “Reset” button always shows as last item and with border.
Global Styles: Disable “Reset styles” button when there are no changes.
Fix: Removed shuffle button when only 1 pattern is present.
fix: wp icon focus issue.
useBlockElement: return null until ref callback has time to clean up the old element.

The following core tickets from Trac are fixed:
Block Hooks: Incorrect context passed when setting ignored hooked blocks metadata
Patterns menu item, put back the context parameter.
wp_localize_script() on login_enqueue_scripts hook change in behavior
Some PHPUnit Tests are failing (test changes only)
Autoprefixer warning in `src/wp-admin/css/media.css` when running `precommit:css` Grunt task
Fatal error when passing non-strings to `WP_Translation_Controller::load_file()`
Classic Theme with theme.json attempts to load templates
Layout: Output of base layout rules conflicts with wide alignment of blocks in classic themes
Fix get_item_features() in class-avif-info.php
6.5 adds the “is-layout-constrained” class to the wrong place for classic themes
Plugin management: AJAX plugin activation consequences
The following block editor issues from GitHub are fixed:
#60489 – Layout: Skip outputting base layout rules that reference content or wide sizes if no layout sizes exist
#60620 – Fix inserter pattern pagination focus loss
#60608 – Fix static posts page setting resolved template
#60641 – Font Library: Fix modal scrollbar
#60661 – Interactivity API: Allow multiple event handlers for the same type with data-wp-on.
#60668 – Layout: Always add semantic classes
#60845 – List View: Fix stuck dragging mode in UI in Firefox when dealing with deeply nested lists
#60764 – Don’t output base flow and constrained layout rules on themes without theme.json