What’s New in Gutenberg? (20th February)

More than 51 contributors participated in this release. It marks an important milestone for Phase 2, as it’s the end of the porting widgets to blocks project. Next releases will be focused on explorations around the Widgets screen.

Widgets 2 Blocks

This release also includes a big refactoring to the formatting buttons and the RichText component, allowing us to fix a significant number of issues and to improve the writing flow.

CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. blocks (aside from the Classic blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.) are not using TinyMCE under the hood anymore. This change should not have any perceivable impact, as the APIs of the RichText component and the custom formats registration have not changed.

In addition, contributors have worked on a number of improvements to existing blocks and UIUI User interface micro-animations.

Enhanced Menus

Click to activate embed blocks

5.1

Features

Enhancements

Bug Fixes

Various

Chore

Documentation

Mobile

Performance Benchmark

The following benchmark compares performance for a particularly sizeable post (~ 36000 words, ~ 1000 blocks) over the last releases. Such a large post isn’t representative of the average editing experience, but is adequate for spotting variations in performance.

VersionLoading TimeKeyPress event (typing)
GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ 5.1.09.4 seconds16.4ms
Gutenberg 5.0.010.4 seconds16.4ms
Gutenberg 4.8 (WordPress 5.1)13.6 seconds158.2ms
Gutenberg 4.7 (WordPress 5.0)15.1 seconds203.5ms

👏 Kudos to all the contributors. Thank you.

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg