Things are going well on the road towards completing the first phase of the editor project. Most of the work is centered around polish, getting things ready for merge, and tightening existing APIs.

This release has many refinements and improves the capabilities of the Block and Plugin APIs. It also adds a new “spacer” block for generating visual space. The color palette component has been improved to be based on classes instead of inline styles (for registered colors) and includes some important accessibility improvements (like naming the color). Thank you to everyone involved!

2.8 🌌

• Add a pasting schema in raw content handling. It simplifies whitelisting and reduces the amount of filters run. Should improve reliability, clarity, markdown conversion, and usage in blocks.
• Add “Spacer” block to create empty areas.
• Add Server Side Render component.
• Expand public InnerBlocks API with support for template configuration and allowedBlocks logic.
• ColorPalette improvements:
  • Implement mechanism to use classes for configured colors instead of inline styles. Use it in Button block as well.
  • Use color name in ColorPalette aria-label for making color selection more accessible.
  • Improve accessibility of PanelColor by announcing currently set color by name.
  • Hide color pickers in paragraph and button if no colors are available.

Other changes

• Add a format prop to allow HTML string values to be used in RichText component. This should be a useful API addition for plugin developers.
• Improve the make gallery modal and allow it to use the correct mode when editing.
• Improve performance by avoiding creating a new uids prop on each block rerender.
• Make sure createInnerBlockList never updates when passed using context.
• Introduce initial “entities” data model abstraction to automatically build state selectors.
  
• Hide the movers and the block menu when typing.
• Optimize the shouldComponentUpdate path of withSelect.
• Use support: align API in Columns block, fixes issue with alignment.
• Filter the PostFormat list to those supported by the theme.
• Used fallback styles to compute font size slider initial position.
• Indent serialized block output with tabs as part of Block API.
• Add a RichText.Content component to be used in conjunction with RichText.
• Determine emptiness by value in RichText.
• Call resolver isFulfilled once per argument set in data modules.
• Extend BlockEdit context with name and use it for autocompleters.
• Improve order of block shortcuts within inline inserter.
• Improve terms token feedback and accessibility.
• Introduce theme_supports with formats to REST API index.
• Switch post-author component to use /wp/v2/users/?who=authors. Related #42202.
• Further harden who=authors check by author support for post type.
• Disable link suggestions when value is URL.
• Make CodeEditor component more extensible.
• Allow the new “block remove” button appear on focus.
• Add new “pure” higher order component to wp/element.
• Add Embed Preview support for classic embed providers. This handled legacy embeds.
• Add missing label and focus style to the code editor textarea.
• Introduce editorMediaUpload wrapper and fix issue with images not being attached to a post.
  
• Used editorMediaUpload in Gallery files transform (images drag&drop).
• Make URL creation mechanism smarter around relative links.
• Add a type attribute to input elements.
• Add missing custom class in latest posts & categories block.
• Add visible label to shared block name input.
• Add ref="noreferrer noopener" for target="_blank" links.
• Add drop cap help text in paragraph block.
• Remove the text alignment from the block inspector in Cover Image.
• Make sure aria-disabled buttons (movers) stay disabled on focus.
  
• Simplify the BlockBreadcrumb component and its semantics.
• Only display featured image UI when theme supports it.
• Improve display of URL input.
• Improve consistency in how + icon is shown on the inserters.
• Extract block library to separate module.
  
• Improve handling of admin theme colors.
• Avoid calculating the closest positioned parent by binding the RichText wrapper div.
• Use IconButton on breadcrumbs to increase consistency and accessibility.
• Reset change detection on post update, resolving an issue where changes made while a post is saving are not accurately reflected in change detection.
• Hide inspector controls if no image is selected in Cover Image.
• Minor improvements for the permalink “Copy to clipboard” button.
• Fix scrolling issues with very long and multi-line captions.
• Fix problem with front-end output of LatestsPosts block.
• Fix issue with using zero min value in RangeControl.
• Fix Markdown paste containing HTML.
• Fix permalink linking to preview URL instead of live.
• Fix issue with update button becoming invisible on mobile on already published posts.
• Fix showing/hiding the right block side UI on RTL languages.
• Fix Classic block regression after extraction of the blocks into a separate script.
• Fix issue where when creating a new post would default to the block sidebar if it was opened before.
• Fix issue when pasting content with inline shortcodes would produce a separate block.
• Fix BlockEdit hooks not working properly with context.
• Fix regression with select box.
• Fix translation strings in embed block.
• Fix regression with formatting button hover/focus style.
• Fix arrow navigation in the shared block more options menu.
• Fix orderby typo in latest posts block.
• Fix the clipboard button as IconButton usage.
• Restore hiding drop cap on focus to prevent bugs with contenteditable.
• Restore priority on embed block for raw transforming.
• Remove no longer mandatory use of isSelected in block edit.
• Remove permalink_structure from REST API index as per #42465.
• Remove old solution for focus after deprecation period.
• Refactor withColors HOC to allow configuring the mapping when instantiating the component.
• Refactor PanelColor to avoid the need for the colorName prop.
• Use a “users” reducer combined with a “queries” sub state to map authors to users.
• Make sure block assets are always registered before wp-edit-post script.
• Expose Gutenberg Data Format version in the REST API response.
• Split loading of API actions and filters to its own file.
• Switch to rest_get_server() for compatibility with trunk.
• Pre-load REST API index data to avoid flash of missing data.
• Deprecate event proxying in RichText.
• Avoid duplicate save request in shared block which could cause race conditions.
• Update docs folder structure and make all internal handbook links relative.
• Update theme extensibility documentation to include editor widths.
• Add section about translating the plugin to the contributing doc.
• Improve documentation and clarity of the Toolbar component.
• Add documentation for undefined attribute source.
• Add isDebounced prop in autocompleter doc.
• Add arrow-spacing rule to eslint config.
• Add arrow-parens rule to eslint config.
• Enforce array as Lodash path argument.
• Upgrade react-datepicker to 1.4.1.
• Upgrade showdown to 1.8.6.
• Drop deprecations slated for 2.8 removal.
• Use the @wordpress/word-count package.
  
• Use @wordpress/is-shallow-equal for shallow equality.
• Build Tools: Fix the package plugin script.
• Improve the G in Gutenberg ASCII 🔷

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg