The Month in WordPress – November 2023 – WordPress News

November is usually a busy month for the WordPress project, and this year is no different. Following the empowering release of WordPress 6.4, the energy continues to build, setting the stage for the anticipated State of the Word and upcoming projects. 

Read on for all the exciting updates that marked the past month.

Get ready for State of the Word

Mark your calendars—State of the Word 2023 is approaching fast. In this annual keynote, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg celebrates the progress of the open source project and offers a glimpse into its future.

For the first time in WordPress history, the event will be held outside North America, in the vibrant city of Madrid, Spain, on December 11, 2023.

If you’re unable to attend the State of the Word in person, you can watch it live on the WordPress YouTube channel or join one of the many community-led watch parties. Find one near you or organize one.

Meet Twenty Twenty-Four

Along with the release of WordPress 6.4 “Shirley,” the new default Twenty Twenty-Four theme was introduced.

This theme breaks away from the tradition of previous default themes that focused on a specific topic or style. Instead, Twenty Twenty-Four was created to fit any website and explore different use cases for entrepreneurs, artists, and writers.

You’ll find more than 35 beautiful patterns, including full-page patterns for templates like homepage, search, and more. Twenty Twenty-Four boasts the latest site editing capabilities and a sophisticated aesthetic inspired by contemporary design trends.

New in the Gutenberg plugin

• Gutenberg 17.0 was released on November 9, 2023. It introduced improvements to the Command Palette, an alternative implementation of the DropdownMenu component, additional visual cues for LinkControl, and various accessibility and performance iterations.
• Gutenberg 17.1 shipped on November 22, 2023. In addition to several accessibility and writing flow enhancements, this version brought a new block spacing control in the Quote block.

Team updates

Requests for feedback & testing

• The Community team announced the 2023 Annual Meetup Survey. Both event attendees and organizers are encouraged to provide feedback in this 5-minute survey to help strengthen WordPress meetups in the future.
• Version 23.7 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS and Android is ready for testing.

WordPress events

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Thank you to Bernard Meyer for contributing to this edition of The Month in WordPress.