WP version 5.5

This update has a few changes that make me happy!

What: First and foremost: a simple way to filter archive titles. Yay! Hooray! Tired of

Category: Books

or

Archive: Products

You can change that Category: or Archive:, or any other archive title prefix, to anything you want or remove it altogether.

How:

If you want to remove the prefix altogether:

add_filter( 'get_the_archive_title_prefix', '__return_empty_string' );

That’s enough, that’s all you have to add to functions.php in your theme, or in a plugin, or for example in the Code Snippets plugin.

If you would prefer to replace the prefix with a custom one, instead of using __return_empty_string, pass the filter a function. For example:

function your_archive_title_prefix( $prefix ){
    $prefix = __( 'All my favorite ', 'your-text-domain' );
}
add_filter( 'get_the_archive_title_prefix', 'your_archive_title_prefix' );

Where: WP 5.5 Field Guide, specifically this post: Filtering Archive Page Headings in WordPress 5.5

Thoughts: This is not the only change I’m happy with, but the one I’ve been longing for the longest.

Another one I’m happy with is the improvements to WordPress image editing. I always warned people against using this because it made display of an image unreliable, or maybe it’s better to say too reliable: it would only display in the way you’d edited it in WordPress. Which might work in one context but not in every context.

Now you can edit directly in the block editor, with more intuitive tools, and it will create a new version of your image, so you can still use the old one elsewhere. What I’m not yet sure of: how well the changes you make to an image will work across devices. We’ll find out by and by.

Read more about Editing Images in the Block Editor.

I think it’s wonderful news that you can now pass arguments to template files and that lazy loading images is part of WordPress.

Wonderful new release, very happy with it. Read the rest of the changes in the WordPress 5.5 Field Guide.

---