The Font Library feature coming in WordPress 6.4 will be a nice addition. It will provide a standard way for managing fonts and serving them locally.

This post on the make blog retrospectively looks at performance improvements gained in WordPress 6.3 over 6.2. Some good progress on mobile and desktop. Note that the discussion about the emoji loader script just means it has gotten more efficient. If you don’t need to add emoji support there is still a performance boost to disabling it.

There is a lot of work and dedication that goes into a WordPress release. This is a nice article that looks at the experiences of three of the 6.3 co-leads.

The WordPress 6.3.1 maintenance release is rolling out now.

Scott Kingsley Clark has restarted the Fields API project with the help of some interested developers. The idea, as I understand it, is rather than have each vendor create their own API for managing custom fields, that there be a core version that vendors could then build off of.

There was some outlining the project during the Contributor Day at WPUS. It is a long road to get something like this added to core.

This post on the Make block introduces the Twenty Twenty-Four Theme. Unlike recent themes, it will be more general use and less opinionated. The theme was designed by Beatriz Fialho, who is a designer and an Automattic sponsored member of the Themes Team. There are screenshots and a short video in the post.

A bug fix release for 6.3 is being prepared. 6.3.1 RC1 is available for testing.

The Roadmap to 6.4 has been published and man is it full of features. There are plans for core font library functionality, new blocks, image lightbox, building out theme.json for spacing presets, a box shadow component, a new Twenty Twenty four theme, enhancements to the Query Loop Block, the Footnote Block, rollback option for theme and plugin automatic updates, foundational work on Phase 3, and more.

This is a long awaited update to the WordPress coding standards rule set checker.