Gutenberg 7.0 has been launched on November 27, 2019 and came with a lot of new features and enhancements. The release of this new version has been shaped with the help of more than 51 contributors. This is one of the biggest number of contributors that have ever come together as a team to enhance the functionality of a plugin.
The latest version of Gutenberg has a loading time of 5.1 seconds which is much lesser than the loading time of the previous one which was 6.6 seconds.
The most exciting feature of the latest version of Gutenberg is, the navigation block has been made a stable feature now. It was added in earlier version just as an experimental feature.
This block editor offers an incredible experience of website-building where a post or page’s content has a different layout; a collection of different blocks.
Here, we are going to discuss some of the eye-catching features of Gutenberg 7.0.
No need to format: With the classic editor, if you copy some content and want to post it then after pasting it there, you will have to format it. It does not get pasted in the source formatting. But the case is different with Gutenberg editor. After pasting, it will remain the way it was.
It is all about blocks: Here, you are not going to deal with all the content as a single piece. On a single page or post, you will have multiple blocks that makes the process of managing the content much easier.
Drag and drop: Once you have pasted all the blocks on a single post or page, you can drag and drop them for repositioning. These blocks can be restructured only by simply dragging and dropping.
Drop Cap: Drop Cap is a large capital letter at the start of a text block. It has the depth equal to two or more lines of the regular text. In this editor, Drop Cap has been introduced in this editor for styling the content. You can enable Drop Cap only with a few clicks.
Reusable Blocks: If there is a block that needs to be repeatedly used then it is not necessary to create it every time. You can just reuse the same block again and again as many times as you want. All you have to do is, save that block to the Reusable Blocks library. Image and text side by side: In the classic editor, it was not possible to place two images or one image and a piece of content side by side. With Gutenberg editor, it has been made possible with the help of Media and Text and column block.
Navigation Block Enhancements:
- Menu items that do not have a defined link will be highlighted.
- Error occurrence in Mozilla Firefox has been prevented when you remove the block.
- The ability to set the background color of the navigation menu has been removed and now the whole menu has been grouped.
- The background shadow for the submenus dropdown has been removed.
- The ‘Navigation Menu Item’ block has been renamed to ‘Link’.
- All unnecessary color attributes have been removed.
- Additional CSS classes are allowed.
- The ‘menu’ suffix has been removed from the block name.
- You can escape special chars when the title and label are propagated to the Rich Text component.
- Style variations have been added.
New APIs:
- Internationalization of strings containing safe HTML is allowed.
- A new card component has been added to WordPress/components.
- Label support for the URL Input component has been added.
- The is Match option for the shortcode transforms is supported now.
Bug Fixes:
- Now the cover block uses gradient classes instead of inline styles.
- The keyboard shortcut styling can be added to “/” in the default tip.
- The caret position can be restored properly on undo.
- Keywords have been added to improve the discoverability of the Audio block.
- Video preview is being shown on Cover block inspector panel.
- Hidden nested images in the content column have been fixed.
- The double border issue in the keyboard shortcuts modal has been fixed.
- The off-centered publish button has been fixed.
- The error occurs when is RTL config is not provided in the block editor settings has been fixed.
- The full-width Table block mobile regression has been fixed.
- A screen reader text label for the Search block has been added.
- The text patterns undo after mouse move have been fixed.
- The block drag and drop for the contributor role has been fixed.
- The link when switching the image used in the Image block has been updated.
- The PHP Error triggered when gutenberg_register_packages_scriptsis run more than once has been fixed.
- Special characters escaping for the post title have been fixed.
- The JavaScript errors triggered when selectors are called before the editor being initialized have been fixed.
- The Base Control component label when no id is passed has been fixed.
- The whitespace will be preserved when converting blocks Preformatted and Paragraph blocks.
- The multiple paste issues creating unnecessary empty spaces have been fixed.
Final Thoughts!
Till now, there have been more than 200,000 active installations of Gutenberg which is a clear evidence that people are accepting the all-new editor and also liking it very much. With the new features that have been introduced in this version, contributors have tried to do a melding of blocks and old templating ideas. It will be interesting to see how this plugin is going to work in the long run.
If you have any queries related to this plugin or any questions related to WordPress then I’m just a call away.
