WordPress has announced that the Widgets Screen feature initially planned for the WordPress 5.6 release will be postponed to version 5.7. This follows WordPress’s decision to prioritize the widget screen by dropping the navigation screen from the 5.6 release.
WordPress 5.6, the final major release for 2020, is scheduled for December.
Despite the delay of two significant features, WordPress 5.6 will include an even bigger feature, making this adjustment more strategic.
Widgets Screen Feature
Widgets are a crucial part of WordPress. The developers decided in early October 2020 to remove the navigational editing screen from WordPress 5.6 to focus on completing the widget screen. Less than two months before the release of WordPress 5.6, it was determined that the widget screen should be pushed to WordPress 5.7.
WordPress 5.7 is scheduled for release in March 2021, providing the team about five more months to prepare the widget screen for publishers.
Widgets Screen Not Close to Being Ready
The delay was attributed to the feature’s lack of readiness. According to WordPress:
“At the current stage of this project, a bulk of that work is done, but more focused testing revealed notable concerns for overall usability (including customizer interactions, some confusions between block & legacy widgets, and UX disparities between the old and new screens).”
Feedback from the WordPress development community suggested that the widgets screen needs significant improvement before it can be included in the WordPress core.
One lead developer described it as a subpar experience:
“…the subpar experience of the separate widgets screen. It also is very jarring to visit the customizer after having added blocks to widget areas because of the way blocks are displayed and handled in that context, and users should be able to flow between whatever works for them freely, not be forced into one or the other without benefit to them.
So, when we come back to this again, let’s keep sight of what it means to keep users feeling secure that they can get their site looking the way they want with WordPress, and not like they are having to work around what we’ve given them.”
Another lead developer expressed relief over the postponement:
“I breathe a sigh of relief, because the new widget screen needs a lot more testing out in the wild before it becomes the new default widget screen in core. We need to get it working properly with the user interface, user flow, and functions testing it in the Gutenberg plugin.”
A third lead developer highlighted the “quirky” user experience of the widgets block, emphasizing the need for more time:
“It’s true, we, as users, want everything to be WYSIWYG as much as possible. The Customizer’s “instant preview” kind of helps, but still feels quirky and hacky (and is far from being WYSIWYG).”
Is WordPress 5.6 Diminished? Not Really.
While the loss of the new widget screen and navigation block editor diminishes the initial excitement for WordPress 5.6, the upside is significant. The delay allows the WordPress team to focus on making WordPress 5.6 compatible with PHP 8, which is set to release on November 26, 2020.
Citation
Refer to the official WordPress announcement for more details.
