WordPress is a living, breathing platform that is constantly evolving. With each major release, a host of powerful new features and refined improvements are introduced that can fundamentally change how you build and manage your website. For any serious WordPress user, keeping an eye on the horizon is key to staying ahead.
Following the recent releases which have focused heavily on enhancing the Site Editor and the power of blocks (known as Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project), the official WordPress roadmap is now shifting its focus to an exciting and ambitious new frontier: Collaboration.
The next major release, WordPress 6.9, is expected to be the flagship release that lays the groundwork for this new phase. It promises to transform WordPress from a content management system into a true collaborative creation platform.
This article is your first look at what’s new in WordPress 6.9. While the release is still in active development, we’ve been closely following the discussions, commits, and early work being done in the Gutenberg plugin to give you an authoritative preview of the major features and enhancements you can expect to see.
Table of Contents
The Big Picture: Welcome to Gutenberg Phase 3 – Collaboration
To understand the importance of WordPress 6.9, you need to understand the big picture. The development of the modern WordPress editor is broken down into four phases:
- Phase 1: The Block Editor. This gave us the new content creation experience.
- Phase 2: Full Site Editing. This expanded blocks beyond posts and pages to control the entire website layout (headers, footers, etc.).
- Phase 3: Collaboration. This is the current focus.
- Phase 4: Multilingual. This is the future goal for core multilingual support.
So, what does “Collaboration” actually mean for you as a user?
Imagine the real-time, multi-user experience of Google Docs, but built directly into the WordPress editor. That is the grand vision. Phase 3 is all about enabling multiple users to work on the same content at the same time, see each other’s changes as they happen, leave comments, and manage a seamless editorial workflow without ever needing to switch to another application.
WordPress 6.9 is expected to be the first major release to introduce the foundational elements of this collaborative future.
Expected Features in WordPress 6.9
Based on current development priorities, here are the major features we anticipate will be part of WordPress 6.9.
1. Real-Time Collaboration (The Headline Feature)
This is the game-changer that Phase 3 is built around. While the full Google Docs-style experience will take multiple releases to perfect, WordPress 6.9 is expected to introduce the first iteration of real-time co-editing.
- What to Expect: The initial implementation will likely focus on preventing the frustrating “post locking” that currently happens when one user opens a post that another user is editing. Instead, we can expect to see the ability for multiple users to be inside a post at the same time. You might see indicators or live cursors showing who is editing a specific block. The goal is to make the entire process of co-authoring, editing, and reviewing content a seamless, real-time experience.
- Why it Matters: For multi-author blogs, newsrooms, and agencies, this is revolutionary. It eliminates the clunky, inefficient workflow of writing in one program, sharing it via email or another tool for edits, and then copying the changes back into WordPress. The entire editorial process, from first draft to final approval, can happen in one place.
2. The Font Library
This is a highly anticipated feature that will make managing typography on your site infinitely easier.
- What to Expect: Currently, adding custom fonts to a block theme requires you to manually edit your theme’s
theme.jsonfile, which is a technical task. The new Font Library will introduce a simple, visual interface directly within the Site Editor’s “Styles” panel. You’ll be able to upload font files, install fonts from Google Fonts, and manage your active fonts just as easily as you manage images in the Media Library. - Why it Matters: It democratizes typography. This feature will give every user, regardless of their technical skill, the ability to easily upload and use custom fonts to perfectly match their brand’s identity.
3. More Powerful and Polished Site Editor
The work on refining the Site Editor is never finished. WordPress 6.9 will continue to add more power and polish to the full site editing experience.
- Partial Syncing for Patterns: This is a subtle but incredibly powerful enhancement. Currently, a “synced pattern” is identical everywhere it’s used. If you change it in one place, it changes everywhere. Partial syncing will allow you to create patterns where the structure and styling are locked, but the content (like text and images) can be unique for each instance. For example, you could create a “Team Member” card pattern where the layout is always the same, but the photo and name can be changed each time you use it. This offers the perfect blend of design consistency and content flexibility.
- Enhanced Style Book: Expect improvements to the Style Book, the tool that lets you see and style every block on your site from one central location. This will likely include better organization and a more intuitive workflow for managing your site’s global styles.
- More Design Tools for Blocks: With each release, more design tools (like advanced border controls, box shadows, and spacing options) are added to more core blocks. We can expect this trend to continue, further reducing the need for custom CSS to achieve polished designs.
4. The Block Bindings API (A Developer’s Dream, A User’s Power-Up)
This is a more technical feature, but its implications for all users are huge.
- What it is (in simple terms): Imagine a block on your page (like a heading or a paragraph) is a picture frame. The Block Bindings API is a new technology that lets that frame automatically display a “picture” (content) from another source, like a custom field.
- Why it Matters: This unlocks incredibly powerful possibilities for creating dynamic websites. For example, a business owner could create a custom field for their “Business Phone Number.” They could then use a simple paragraph block in their website’s footer and “bind” it to that field. If they ever need to update their phone number, they change it in that one custom field, and it automatically updates everywhere on the site instantly. This makes managing site-wide information incredibly efficient.
5. Continued Refinements to the Block Editor
Of course, we can expect continued improvements to the core writing experience, including potential new blocks, enhancements to existing blocks, and a more streamlined user interface.
How to Prepare for WordPress 6.9
A major WordPress release is exciting, but it’s wise to be prepared.
- Prioritize a Staging Site: Never update your live, mission-critical website on the day a major new version is released. Always test the new version on a “staging site” (a private clone of your live site) first. This allows you to check for any potential compatibility issues with your specific theme and plugins in a safe environment.
- Wait for the “.1” Release: As a general rule of thumb for production sites, it’s often best to wait a week or two for the first minor “bug fix” release (e.g., 6.9.1) to come out. This ensures any initial unforeseen issues have been resolved.
- Embrace the Block Editor: If your team is still primarily using the Classic Editor, now is the time to start transitioning your workflow. The future of WordPress is collaborative and block-based, and familiarizing your team with the modern editor now will prepare you to take full advantage of these new tools when they arrive.
The Future is Collaborative
WordPress 6.9 is shaping up to be more than just another incremental update. It signals the dawn of a new era for WordPress—an era focused on transforming the platform from a system for managing content into a dynamic workspace for creating content, together.
By understanding what’s on the horizon, you can prepare your skills and your website to leverage these powerful new capabilities. The future of WordPress is not just about building websites; it’s about building them as a team, more efficiently and seamlessly than ever before.