This update gathers a big number of fixes and improvements. It also completes many accessibility tasks — the original milestone for blockers is now closed.

Version 4.3 is fully released and Beta 4 will be coming later in the day.

4.3 / WordPress 5.0 (Beta 4) 🐺

• Always show the block icon in the toolbar, regardless of whether the block has transformations or styles.
• Allow toggling the core custom fields meta box.
• Introduce an API to handle annotations across blocks and rich text fragments.
• Separate paste handling from raw handling in general. Raw handling aims to convert HTML without comment delimiters to blocks, trying to retain as much content as possible. Pasting is more opinionated in what it retains as it also serves as source cleanup.
• Allow using a YouTube URL (or other sources) in the Video block and transparently convert it to Embed.
• Allow Alt+F10 keyboard shortcut to navigate to block toolbar regardless of the toolbar visibility (isTyping, etc).
• Return focus to element that opened the post publish panel after it is closed.
• Add URL validation to link input in RichText.
• Avoid unnecessary re-renders when navigating between blocks.
• Improve interactions around Columns block.
• Improve keyboard navigation through the Gallery block.
• Allows blocks to opt-out of being available for reusable block conversion.
• Use full parser in do_blocks with nested block support. This switch will allow dynamic blocks which contain nested blocks inside of them and it will pave the way for a filtering API to structurally process blocks.
• Update server parsing to better handle nested content, including positional information from the parse to enable isomorphic reconstruction of the source post_content after server parsing.
• Refactor contextual toolbar to work better with floats.
• Improve handling of undo/redo button states.
• Auto-refresh Popovers position but only refresh if the anchor position changes.
• Refactor change detection around initial edits to better handle user-initiated edits.
• Create multiple File blocks when multiple files are drag and dropped.
• Constraint tabbing within post publish panel.
• Add transformations between Video, Image, and Media & Text block.
• Add option for blocks with child blocks to change selection behavior.
• Add speech announcement for multi-selection of blocks.

Bug Fixes

• Improve accessibility of empty text blocks.
• Address different state conditions for disabling publish buttons.
• Display correct Taxonomy labels.
• Add min-width to audio block.
• Avoid auto-saving with empty post content.
• Fix incorrect import name.
• Fix styling issue with checkboxes.
• Add full set of reusable block post type labels (addresses “no blocks found” state).
• Fix behavior on long press of enter button.
• Fix right to left block alignment.
• Fix “updating failed” notices showing on long-open tabs.
• Fix default PHP parser to cast inner blocks as arrays.
• Fix JS/PHP inconsistencies with empty attributes on parsing.
• Use source_url for media file link in Image block.
• Fix “select all” keyboard shortcut in Safari and Firefox.
• Fix potential theme syle clash.
• Make preview button a link.
• Stop re-rendering all blocks on arrow navigation.
• Fix image uploading bug (incorrect JSON in apiFetch).
• Fix taxonomy visibility for contributor role.
• Add aria labels to images in gallery blocks during editing for accessibility.
• Fix applying formats on multiline values without wrapper tags.
• Hide custom fields when meta box is disabled.
• Limit Pullquote color auto-selection to solid color blocks for readability.
• Fix displaying upload errors in the image block.
• Fix ability to select Embed blocks on click.
• Optimize JSON attribute parsing.
• Fix focus issue on post link in publish panel.
• Resolve macOS Firefox / Safari sibling inserter behavior.
• Fix sibling inserter visibility on tab focus.
• Fix issue with pasting from Word where an image would be created instead of text.
• Fix multi-selection for float elements.
• Fetch all tag terms, not just first 100.
• Fix front-end issue with Media & Text block right display.
• Only show appropriately named image sizes as options.
• Update “view as” link after permalink is edited.
• Adjust font size computations used in contrast warning.
• Better handling for nested formatting from Google Docs.
• Fix regressions and improve the suggestion list scrolling when using keyboard.
• Use different tooltips for different alignment buttons.
• Add missing periods in block descriptions.
• Add missing translator comments for Quote and Pullquote.
• Change aria-checked to only be used on matching ARIA roles for MenuItem. Fixes accessibility issue of BlockNavigationList.
• Restore click to close dropdown interaction.
• Fix issue with save lock control logic.
• Fix issue with Timezone handling in scheduling logic.
• Fix unexpected behavior of backspace.
• Improve context of exposed aria labels in paragraph blocks based on their contents.

Other Changes

• With this change we force the browser to treat the textarea for the
  code editor as auto when handling direction for its display to preserve the ability to interact with the block delimiters.
• Refactor block styles registration to avoid timing issues.
• Refactor RichText to update formatting bar so every change to the list of format types is immediately reflected in the UI.
• Add support for preparing RichText tree.
• Rename parentClientId to rootClientId.
• Remove deprecated findDOMNode call from Tooltip component.
• Remove fixed cover on iOS (unsupported in mobile Safari).
• Remove unused ref assignment to RichText.
• Remove redundant onClickOutside handler from Dropdown.
• Reshape blocks state under own key.
• Remove Cloudflare warning for blocked API calls.
• Remove _wpGutenbergCodeEditorSettings (dead code).
• Refactor Embed block code.
• Handle meta-box warning exceptions.
• Rename wp-polyfill-ecmascript.
• Remove findDOMNode usage from NavigableToolbar.
• Remove moment from the public API of the date module.
• Remove findDomNode from withHoverAreas.
• Refactor to import Format API components.
• Remove undefined className argument from save().
• Improve performance and handling of autosave.
• Improve gallery upload for multiple images: load one by one.
• Adds context variable to RichText component.
• Avoid calling missing get_current_screen function.
• Make cssnano remove all style comments.
• Normalize blockType function arguments.
• Allow kitchensink button in Classic to be removed by plugins.
• Further improvements to Columns block.
• Update More block description for consistency.
• Use apostrophe instead of single-quote character in strings.
• Enforce version increment for recently published npm packages.
• Update Lerna to latest version.
• Move wp-polyfill-ecmascript override to scripts registration.

Testing

• Add tests for Format API.
• Improve consistency of parser tests.
• Add E2E test for rapid enter presses.
• Add mocking helpers for E2E tests.
• Allow running E2E tests with the user role as author.
• Remove code coverage setup.

Documentation

• Improve documentation and examples for withFilters HOC.
• Add instructions for add custom icon to a category.
• Fix some broken links in documentation.
• Fix typo and quote consistency.
• Update documentation on keyboard shortcuts to include “remove a link”.
• Update isSelectionEnabled documentation.
• Update FontSizePicker component documentation.
• Fix typos in block API documentation.

Mobile Apps

• Expose switchToBlockType function on native.
• Remove mobile RN test suite (temporary measure).
• Improve styling of next page block.
• Add support for native media picker.
• Remove onChange delay.
• Expose slot/fill pattern to mobile.
• Expose wordpress/editor to mobile.
• Refresh native post block after merge.
• Properly handle cancel on the media picker.

Deprecations removed with this version.

Status Update

• Current PRs for review: 35 in 4.4 Milestone.
• Open issues in 5.0 RC: 162.
• Open issues in 5.0.0: 2.
• Open issues in 5.0.1: 2.
• Open issues in 5.0.x (fast follow): 15.
• Current beta: Beta 3, November 5.
• Current plugin: 4.3, released today.
• Next beta: Beta 4, planned for today.

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg