Members of the WordPress 6.1 release squad recently gathered for a product walkthrough on Zoom, where Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura gave an informal tour of some of the new features coming in the next release. After the success of the 6.0 walkthrough, this gathering on Zoom has become a new part of the release cycle.

The event took place on Tuesday and the recording was published today. If you haven’t stayed up to date on 6.1 development, this short video (embedded below) gives you a transparent tour of features in their current state and shows some things that still need to be polished.

Ventura starts off with a hands-on demo of Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3) and its style variations. He also dived into the new templates and the ability to create custom templates:

I’m really excited about this because it opens up the power of WordPress to any user now. If you want to, you have a special category of travel, and you want to create a template for that category, you can do it. And there’s another improvement here. Before, when you were creating a template, it will start completely blank. Now it loads the most relevant template for this. In this case, it was the Archive. So it’s using – you are modifying the tag template, but it’s using the Archive type as its basis. So you don’t need to start from scratch. Obviously, here, in the future, will probably have different starting points, the same way that we have Patterns when you create a new page and so on.

He also covered more advanced locking features, the ability to create locked patterns where only a few tools are exposed, improved placeholders, design tools like fluid typography and spacing presets, developer focused tools, and more.

The 6.1 release squad joined after the walkthrough and covered some other core features, known bugs, and features that are still in limbo. They fielded a few questions from the virtual audience before concluding. Check out the recording below, and the transcript is also available on the post.