WordPress 5.9 — the latest release as of January 25 — is all about improving user experience, or UX. This ultimately enables a positive experience for your site visitors, but it also means creating and editing a site is much faster and easier for you. Full Site Editing, an all-new aspect of WordPress 5.9, opens the door to seamless customizations, even for WP beginners. No matter how detailed you want to get, there’s no need to dive into code with the Editor’s intuitive capabilities.
List View is one of the many features that improve the site editing experience. It provides an at-a-glance view of your site’s layout, with blocks appearing in a hierarchical list. This isn’t a new feature, but it’s been improved significantly. The updated List View boosts your UX in several ways.
Drag and Drop
Rearranging the content on your site is fast and simple in List View. Drag and drop blocks, or groups of blocks, directly within the list. This capability is especially helpful for complex page layouts or pages with long-form content and images.
Users new to blocks will find List View especially helpful because it leaves no room for confusion over where specific blocks and groups of blocks exist on the page.
Editing Within List View
The new List View packs a few editing capabilities directly within the list. When in List View, hover over any block and a three-dot icon will appear on the right-hand side. This opens a list of settings, allowing you to edit the block. Options include removing, grouping, and duplicating blocks, as well as adding them to your reusable blocks for later use.
Collapsible Sections
Lists of blocks can be overwhelming, especially within complex pages with lots of content. Thankfully, the updated List View allows users to collapse sections of nested blocks, enabling total focus on specific aspects of your site. When you want to focus on a specific block group, simply collapse all the others, preventing errors and confusion.
HTML Anchors
HTML anchors allow you to link directly to specific content on your site instead of the whole page. For example, say you’ve written a long-form how-to article. By adding an HTML anchor to a certain heading or subhead, you can link users to the exact information they need. It’s a great strategy for targeted social media posts. This capability enables a much more seamless UX for your site visitors.
And now, you can add HTML anchor tags directly in List View, making it easy to see where your anchors are with one glance. If you have a complex page with multiple anchors, this capability will save you lots of time. It’s also helpful if you’re creating a site on behalf of a client — they can quickly and easily see where you’ve added HTML anchors.
Yet Another WordPress Win
There’s no end to the benefits of WordPress 5.9. List View adds to the long line of features and capabilities that make creating your WordPress site fun, easy, and fast. Take advantage of this feature and more by downloading a block theme with Full Site Editing, and start customizing today.
