What’s new in Gutenberg? (11 December)

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/ 7.1 is a big release with 161 pull requests merged. Thank you to all the contributors of this release!

The release contains many refactors to the code base to make future changes possible, e.g., refactors to functional components so it is possible to use new hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. that are available.

This release tries to make 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. development using standard features like color picking UIUI User interface easier. To do that the release expands the useColors hook to have new functionalities like color contrast checking and default color detection.

There was huge progress on the full site editing work, with the merge of the template part block. Documentation efforts for the FSE (full site editing) work are now in progress.

Gutenberg 7.1 brings a new welcome UI for new users:

This release also Introduces table captions and implements a UI mechanism to toggle between edit and select modes:

The last two enhancements to note are the new fixed-mobile toolbar and the improved multi-block selection experience:

7.1 🇲🇽

Features

Enhancements

Bug Fixes

APIs

Experiments

Documentation

Performance

Various

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)
Gutenberg 7.1.07.45s88.56ms
Gutenberg 7.0.06.84s94ms
WordPress 5.36.33s75.19ms

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg