Gutenberg 4.8 is the first plugin release after WordPress 5.0 that is not going to be backported entirely to the WordPress 5.0.x releases. The bug fixes and performance improvements have been cherry-picked into the upcoming WordPress 5.0.3 release.

The Changelog is a bit long as it includes a lot of PRs that were merged but not included in previous versions due to the more critical work needed for the WordPress 5.0.x releases.

I’d like to particularly thank all the persons that helped and continue to help improve our docs. There has been a lot of nice improvements lately, including a Getting Started with JavaScript tutorial, improvements to the design guidelines to build blocks and high-quality README files for our UI components.

Work on the performance of the editor is also continuing and we can expect more improvements in this area in the next releases as well.

4.8 🚩

Performance

• Improve page initialization time by optimizing the addHook function and the viewport state initialization.
• Improve typing performance by splitting the state tree.
• Optimize partial application of runSelector.
• Move selector calls to the event handles to avoid useless component rerenders.
• Render DropZone children only when dragging elements over it.
• Initialize variables only when needed.

Enhancements

• Add error messages to the image block on upload failures.
• Merge similar i18n strings.
• Disable clipboard button in file block during upload.
• Persist alignment when transforming a gallery to an image and vice-versa.
• Copy enhancement to the embed block help text.
• Improve the scrolling of the WordPress navigation menu.

Bug Fixes

• Fix RTL support for the DatePicker component.
• Change the header level in the BlockCompare component.
• Show all the taxonomies in the sidebar.
• Fix the latest posts date className.
• Fix the “align center” button in Latest Posts block in the backend.
• Fix block height when DropCap is used.
• Fix converting caption shortcode with link.
• Fix edge case in addQueryArgs function.
• Don’t return the permalink if the CPT is not publicly viewable.
• Fix error when saving non public CPTs.
• Properly disable the Publish button when saving is disabled.

Various

• Show a message in the browser’s console when in Quirks Mode.
• Improvements to the wordpress/scripts package: A new a check-engines command, a lint-style command and an update to lint-js.

Documentation

• Add a getting started with JavaScript tutorial.
• Document the blocks’ setup states in the design guidelines.
• Add content to Contributors index page.
• Improve the components documentation:
  • The MenuItem component.
  • The RadioControl component.
  • The ServerSideRender component.
• Organise the documentation assets in a dedicated folder.
• Clarify immutability of the block attributes.
• Fix the metabox back compat code example.
• Fix incorrect data module example.
• Improve the plugin release docs.
• Remove useless property from the colors code example.
• Improve the contributing documentation.
• Fix npm README links.
• Update the design resources link.
• More, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more and  more typo fixes.

Chore

• Run e2e tests with popular plugins enabled.
• Add new e2e tests:
  • The permalink panel.
  • The categories panel.
  • Blocks with meta attributes.
• Update node-sass to fix Node 11 support.
• Move the dev dependencies to the root package.json.
• Improve the Pull Request Template.
• More logs to the CI jobs.
• Code style fixes and expand the phpcs coverage.
• Disable fragile e2e tests.
• Avoid PHP notices when running the e2e tests in debug mode.

Mobile

• Make a simple version of DefaultBlockAppender.
• Stop using classname-to-style autotransform in react native.
• Fix SVG styles.
• Implement Enter press to add a default block.
• Hide keyboard when non textual block is selected.
• Fix undo/redo on new blocks.
• Pass the blockType prop to RNAztecView.
• Expose unregisterBlockType.

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg