As we dive into the block-based widgets screen, foundational work is required to support using the Gutenberg editor outside the Post Editor context. This release falls into this category of releases where it’s more about building the foundations and making the Gutenberg modules more flexible to support these new use-cases.

It introduces a new @wordpress/block-editor module allowing building block editors outside the post editor context and even outside the WordPress Admin context. This has some costs on the performance of the keypress events while working on very long posts that we hope to alleviate in the upcoming releases.

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5.2 🇩🇿

Enhancements

• Update the button block description wording.
• Design and a11y improvements for the custom color picker.
• Tweak the FontSizePicker height to match regular select elements.
• Improvements to the local state persistence behavior.
• Improvements to the URL input popover design.
• Disable block navigation and document outline items in text mode.
• Improve the quote block icons.
• Animate the sidebar tabs switching.

Bug Fixes

• Select the last block when pasting content.
• Fix the block validation when the default attribute value of a block is changed.
• Forces the min/max value validation in the RangeControl component.
• Display HTML properly in the post titles of the latest posts block.
• Fix drag and dropping a column block on itself.
• Fix new lines in the preformatted block.
• Fix text underline shortcut.
• Fix calling gutenberg plugin functions in the frontend context.
• Fix pasting a single line from Google Docs (ignoring the strong element).
• Fix FocalPointPicker rendering unlabelled input fields.
• Show the images uploaded in the gallery block in the media modal.
• Fix wordwise selection on Windows.
• Preserve empty table cells when pasting content.
• Fix focus loss when deleting the last block.

Documentation

• Add the Block specific toolbar button sample to the format api tutorial.
• Introduce a package to automatically generate the API documentation.
• Tweaks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Various

• Introduce a generic block editor module.
• Creates an empty page that will contain the future widget screen explorations.
• Fix emoji in the demo content.
• Warn when the user is using an inline element as a RichText container.
• Make Babel import JSX pragma plugin aware of the createElement usage.
• Include the JSX pragma plugin into the default WordPress babel config.
• Update the non-embeddable URLs wording.

Chore

• Refactoring of the block fixtures tests.
• Refactoring the eslint custom import lint rule.
• Refactoring the selection of previous/next blocks actions.
• Refactoring the post editor effects to use actions and resolvers instead.
• Use forEach instead of map when appropriate and enforce it with an eslint rule.
• Remove TinyMCE external dependency mapping.
• Extract webpack config into the scripts package.
• Improve e2e tests stability.t
• Avoid mutating webpack imported config.
• Upgrade Jest to version 24.
• Add repository.directory field to the npm packages and an linting rule to enforce it.
• Update server blocks script to use core equivalent function.
• Remove the vendor scripts registration.
• Use the editor settings to pass a mediaUpload handler.
• Remove deprecated Gutenberg plugin functions and features moved to core.
• Remove unnecessary Enzyme React 16 workarounds from the unit tests.
• Remove wp-editor-font stylesheet override.
• Preserve inline scripts when overriding core scripts.
• Support referencing the IconButton component.
• Refactor the i18n setup of the Gutenberg plugin.

Mobile

• Add an image placeholder when the size is being computed.
• Update the image thumbnail when the image is being uploaded.
• Support the Format Library.
• Bottom Sheet design improvements.
• Update the default block appender placehoder.
• Support pasting content using the Gutenberg paste handler.
• Fix alignment issues for the appender and paragraph block placeholders.

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.

Version	Loading Time	KeyPress event (typing)
Gutenberg 5.2.0	11.7 seconds	57.8 ms
Gutenberg 5.1.0	11.4 seconds	22.25 ms
Gutenberg 4.8 (WordPress 5.1)	15.1 seconds	126 ms
Gutenberg 4.7 (WordPress 5.0)	16 seconds	185.2 ms

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👏 Kudos to all the contributors. Thank you.

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg