More than 31 contributors participated in this Gutenberg release. It comprises of a number of improvements, including to the button block focus states, theming, and block mover controls with full- and wide-aligned blocks.

5.6 🇩🇰

Enhancements

• Improve focus state for button block.
• Reduce specificity of block styles to make it easier for themes to style the editor.
• Optimize data subscribers to avoid unnecessary work on each editor change.
• Avoid overlapping block breadcrumb when block movers are visible for full- and wide-aligned blocks.
• Preload user permissions for reusable blocks to avoid UI flickering for block settings menu options.
• Remove unnecessary bottom padding for nested lists.
• Restore block movers to focus mode.
• Improve display of categories list panel.

Bug Fixes

• Restore block movers to full- and wide-aligned blocks.
• Always show drag handles for nested blocks, even when only a single block exists.
• Improve HTML output for formatted text.
• Fix an error preventing registerFormatType to be called wrongly indicated as duplicate.
• Resolve problematic post lock release behavior when leaving the editor when using newer versions of Chrome.
• Resolve an issue to detect autosave presence at editor load in considering saveability.
• Resolve a typo which could interfere with audio shortcode transforms.
• Apply RichText attributes correctly to resolve an issue with registerFormatType.
• Preserve attributes of a multi-line classic block paragraph.
• Resolve an issue for Windows and Linux development mode due to a access key safeguard.

Various

• Refactor a number of core blocks toward better interoperability with the Blocks RFC: [1], [2], [3], [4].
• Move selection state for RichText components to the block editor store, to enable future work to resolve or improve selection behavior.
• Change the behavior of reusable blocks autocomplete to fetch upon input, improving reliability of tests and avoiding unnecessary network requests.
• Allow development mode constant to be redefined by plugins.
• Improve reliability of e2e tests: [1], [2], [3].
• Avoid running files contained in the git subfolder as tests.
• Resolve an issue with e2e errors related to dependencies updates.
• Add a new ESLint rule to enforce accessible use of BaseControl.
• Remove redundant CSS styles.
• Add e2e tests for dynamic allowed blocks, transforms from media to embed block, explicit persistence undo regression.
• Add a new wpDataSelect e2e test utility.
• Include a React hooks ESLint configuration.
• Add a new Webpack plugin to help externalize and extract script dependencies (not yet published).

Documentation

• Include auto-generated documentation for core data module actions and selectors.
• Update contributing documentation to extract detailed sections to their own documents.
• Document the withGlobalEvents higher-order component creator.
• Add related resources for BlockEditor components.
• Clarify requirements for e2e-test-utils package.
• Exclude private, experimental, and unstable APIs from auto-generated data documentation.
• Include missing DropZone component props in documentation.
• Mention component stylesheets in usage instructions.
• Update copy/paste support list to reflect paste support of images from Microsoft Word and Libre/Open Office.
• Add missing “Code is Poetry” footers.
• Improve wording of JavaScript Tutorial document.
• Improve Travis build performance by expanding containers for e2e tests.

Mobile

• Refine transitions for bottom sheets.
• Extract a HorizontalRule component for use in a cross-platform separator block.
• Fix an error with changing list types.
• Avoid setting caret when rich-text text will be trimmed.
• Fix title not focusing.
• Improve post title accessibility.
• Improve image block accessibility for deselected, and selected states.
• Add accessibility label for unselected paragraph.
• Fix history stack when not empty on a fresh start of the editor.
• Improve Heading block accessibility.
• Make accessibility string properly localizable.
• Update string concatenation for accessibility labels.

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 5.6.0	6.7s	94.2ms
Gutenberg 5.5.0	6.6s	88.7ms
Gutenberg 4.8 (WordPress 5.1)	8.6s	154.1ms
Gutenberg 4.7 (WordPress 5.0)	11.2s	191.44ms

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👏 Kudos to all the contributors. Thank you.

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg