Riad Benguella from the WordPress Plugin development team announced the new update for Gutenberg 8.7.0 on August 5. The latest update features a lot of enhancements, bug fixes, features, and more. Development is focused on WordPress 5.5, so we don’t see any major updates at the moment. However, the team is working on the plugin, adding new features and making it more stable.
Gutenberg 8.7 contains over 30 bug fixes, almost a third of which were accessibility-related improvements. Approximately half of the new additions focused on updating block patterns.
Users can look forward to several minor enhancements that should improve the editor, such as getting a proper preview in the inserter to the Buttons block. This update should also be more consistent with the monitoring solution behind auto-saving.
The most user-facing enhancement is the change in the handling of invalid blocks. The plugin’s latest version makes the trial block recovery option the default. This change hides the resolution, converts to classic, and under the sub-menu (ellipsis button) converts to HTML options. This is a pretty touch and it makes the most sense. In general, attempting to reclaim a block should be the first step in correcting invalid block output.
Block Pattern Updates
The team took for a feature what looked like to be one of the most disappointing first outings and turned it into something that the project could be proud of.
The pattern “large header with heading” dropped the gradient of the blinding background and replaced it with an image. Now the “quote” pattern has a face, rather than an impersonal icon. Even the pattern of “two images next to each other” fits in thematically.
Experimental Features Updates
Much of the work for this release focused on the experimental features of the plugin. The bulk of it went towards blocks that were post-related. These features are so experimental at this point that even experienced developers outside of the Gutenberg inner circle are having trouble following the progress. Process usually in this area is nice to see. It isn’t even ready for a quick look from a user’s point of view, though. Allowing at your own risk. Wait until you polish the product a little bit more.
Performance Tests
Compared to Gutenberg 8.6, the loading time of this latest version has slightly increased from 6.84 seconds to 6.97 seconds. However, the duration of the key-press event slightly decreased from 27.15 milliseconds to 26.63 milliseconds. Performed on a post containing 36,000 words and 1,000 lines.
| Version | Loading Time | KeyPress Event (typing) |
|---|---|---|
| Gutenberg 8.7 | 6.97 s | 26.63 ms |
| Gutenberg 8.6 | 6.84 s | 27.15 ms |
| WordPress 5.4 | 9.55 s | 43.81 ms |
For more details on the Bug Fixes, New APIs, Enhancements, Experiments, Documentation. Please check out the official announcement.
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