WordPress 6.4 has recently been released which holds many updates and upgrades for the platform we use.

Top Toolbar

One of the main ones we have seen that may impact users is the “Top Toolbar” option. What this does is to move the editing toolbar from the block itself to the top of the page. There are benefits to this in such that the page use is smoother and blocks won’t move as much when clicking around the page.

Top Toolbar can be toggled on or off from the top right hand menu of the page.

If you log in and don’t recognise the option Top Toolbar may have been enabled after the recent update. This can be helpful though as it gives access to different options that we discuss later in the article.

Below are two screenshots with the toolbar turned off and off so you can recognise the difference when selecting a paragraph within the editor.

Top Toolbar Off

Top Toolbar On

Document Overview

This button found in the top left of the screen and looks like three stepped lines gives you a breakdown of the structure of the page. So you can see exactly what is on the page and how it is structured, on the right you can see the current structure of this page made up with images and text.

From here you can also drag and drop the items, this can come in especially useful when trying to move elements in our out of columns, or understand how your page is set out and using different types of blocks.

Document Outline

In this section there is also a useful feature called Document Outline it lets you know how your your page or article is laid out from a writing perspective, it will give you the number of characters, words and an estimated time for a user to read your documents.

Along with this it will also highlight any issues with the nesting of headings within your page. What this means is that the heading numbers, h2, h3, h4 etc are in line, when writing an article you should always move down one number at a time but you can move back up as many as you like.

Further Information

These updates will be integrated into our usual training sessions so if you have any questions feel free to book onto one of the upcoming sessions.

Training Sessions