More than 51 contributors helped shape the 7.0.0 Gutenberg release. It’s one of the biggest number of contributors we’ve ever had.

The release includes a big number of fixes and enhancements to the Navigation block and marks it as a stable feature.

In terms of APIs, developers will be happy to know that this PR introduced some new APIs like allowing the internationalization of strings containing safe HTML, a new Card component in wordpress/components and a few other enhancements we encourage you to try and provide feedback.

7.0 🇷🇴

Features

• Add a new Navigation block (early version)
  • Highlight menu items without defined URL.
  • Prevent error in Firefox when removing the block.
  • Remove background color from the Navigation block and rely on the Group block.
  • Remove the background shadow for the submenus dropdown.
  • Rename “Navigation Menu Item” block to “Link”.
  • Remove unnecessary color attributes.
  • Allow addition CSS classes.
  • Drop the “menu” suffix from the block name.
  • Escape special characters in the frontend.
  • Remove from experimental features.
  • Add style variations.

Enhancements

• Use gradient classnames instead of inline styles for the Cover block.
• Inserter: Add keyboard shortcut styling to “/” in the default tip.
• Restore the caret position properly on undo.
• Add keywords to improve the discoverability of the Audio block.
• Show video preview on Cover block inspector panel.

Bug Fixes

• Fix hidden nested images in the content column.
• Fix double border issue in the keyboard shortcuts modal.
• Fix off-centered publish button.
• Fix error when isRTL config is not provided in the block editor settings.
• Fix full width Table block mobile regression.
• A11y: Add a screen reader text label for the Search block.
• Fix text patterns undo after mouse move.
• Fix block drag and drop for the  contributor role.
• Update the link when switching the image used in the Image block.
• Fix php error triggered when gutenberg_register_packages_scripts is run more than once.
• Fix special characters escaping for the post title.
• Fix JavaScript errors triggered when selectors are called before the editor being initialized.
• Fix BaseControl component label when no id is passed.
• Preserve whitespace when converting blocks Preformatted and Paragraph blocks.
• Fix multiple paste issues creating unnecessary empty spaces.

New APIs

• Add a new Card component to wordpress/components.
• Add label support for the URLInput component.
• Support the isMatch option for the shorcode transforms.

Experiments

• Block Content areas:
  • Add Post Title and Post Content blocks.
  • Add template parts CPT and the theme resolution logic.
• Widgets Screen:
  • Refactor the legacy widgets block to support all blocks.
  • Fix widget areas margins.
  • Add isRTL setting.
• APIs
  • useColors hook: Enhance the contrast checking API and provide access to the color value.
  • Introduce createInterpolateElement to allow translation of complex strings with HTML content.
  • A11y: Refactor the accessibility behavior of the Toolbar component.
• Social Links:
  • Capitalize LinkedIn and GitHub properly.
  • Fix frontend styling.

Documentation

• Add a Backward Compatibility policy document.
• Clarify the npm packages release documentation.
• Add documentation for the @wordpress/env wp-env.json config file.
• Typos and tweaks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.

Various

• Refactor the RichText component: Remove the inner Editable component.
• Integrate the Gutenberg Playground into Storybook.
• Increase WordPress minimum supported by the plugin to 5.2.0.
• Refactor the Paragraph block edit function as a functional component.
• Refactor the Cover block edit function as a functional component.
• Add new components to Storybook.
  • RadioControl component.
  • TabPanel component.
  • Popover component.
  • BaseControl component.
  • Tip component.
• Include WordPress eslint plugin in React eslint ruleset in wordpress/eslint-plugin.
• Block PRs  on mobile unit test failures in Travis.
• Polish the PostSchedule popover styling.
• Fix the API documentation generation tool when spaces are used in folder names.
• Add missing @babel/runtime dependency to the wordpress/jest-puppeteer-axe.
• Refactor the Layout component to separate the UI from the content.
• Align Dropdown and DropdownMenu components styling.
• Remove max-width style from the Image block.
• Remove the CollegeHumor embed block.
• Add unit tests: 
  • Ensure consecutive edits to the same attribute are considered persistent.
  • Test the core-data undo reducer.

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 7.0.0	5.1s	67.7ms
Gutenberg 6.9.0	6.6s	53.5ms
WordPress 5.3	6.3s	61.44ms

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👏 Kudos to all the contributors. Thank you.

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg