Foundational work and initial UI explorations to implement the block-based widgets screen are on-going. In the meantime, the contributors worked on a number of bug fixes and improvements. All the bug-fixes will be included in the next beta of WordPress 5.2.

5.4 🇬🇧

Features

• Add vertical alignment support for the columns block.
• Add playsinline support for the video block.

Enhancements

• Add the Media Library button to the gallery block appender.
• Improve appearance of the block hover state on colored backgrounds.
• Move the color and font size caption styles into theme styles.
• Replace the verse block icon.
• Standardize align and className attributes for dynamic blocks.
• Remove the title from mobile inserters.
• Capitalize button labels.
• Remove menu toggling on checkbox, radio buttons clicks.
• Make the invisible image resize handlers bigger.
• Improve the alt text field description.

Bug Fixes

• Improve the format boundary styles.
• Convert void blocks properly when converting or pasting content.
• Fix the ClipboardButton component behavior in Safari.
• Fix expanding the text selection when using shift + vertical arrows.
• Fix the alignment of the third-party block settings items.
• Fix invalid HTML in some more menu items.
• Fix JavaScript error in the columns block.
• Fix radio button appearance on small screens.
• Save line breaks in the preformatted block.
• Fix edge case in the is_gutenberg_page plugin function.
• Fix toolbar position in full size aligned blocks on small screens.
• Fix double scrollbar issue in Full Screen mode.
• Fix JavaScript error when downgrading to an old Gutenberg version.
• Fix the WordPress embed block resolution.
• Fix embedding links with trailing slashes.
• Fix the preloading apiFetch middleware when initialized empty.
• Fix php notice when using widgets without description.
• Better horizontal edge detection to fix the arrow key navigation in the table block.
• Fix error in API Fetch initialization.
• Fix unwanted margin in Column block.
• Fixes issue where emoji would be destroyed.

Documentation

• Document the block editor module.
• Add design documentation for the Panel component.
• Document webpack config extensibility.
• Clarify experimental and unstable API guidelines.
• Setup automatic API documentation for the data module.
• Improve the automatic API documentation tool.
• Enhance the components documentation:
  • FormFileUpload component.
  • MediaPlaceholder component.
  • Notice component.
  • TextControl component.
• Updates the blocks creation tutorial.
• Typos & tweaks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Various

• Implement a built-in static Gutenberg Playground.
• Override core block server-side code when using the plugin.
• Make the block editor module more reusable.
• Expose the lazy and Suspence React features in the element package.
• Avoid assuming persisted preferences state shape.
• Remove dead code from the calendar block renderer.
• Extract global CSS resets into reusable mixins.
• Replace image urls by base 64 encoded images in reusable CSS files.
• Add default empty implementation for the block types save function.
• Add a new data action to replace the inner blocks.
• Support parent data registry inheritance in the data module.
• Add extra props support for the Dashicon component.
• Add a BaseControl.VisualLabel component for purely visual labels.
• Refactor setupEditor effects to actions.
• Refactor the core/data store to be independent from the registry object.
• Remove componentWillMount usage from LatestPostEdit component.
• Add a generic e2e test for block transforms and work on its stability.
• Allow e2e test failures for php versions lower than 5.6.
• Add eslint rule to prevent incorrect truthy length property checks.
• Add eslint rule to prevent unsafe setTimeout usage in components.
• Run the local gutenberg environment in debug mode.
• Disable debug mode in local e2e tests.
• Exclude test files while rebuilding packages.
• Make E2E tests resilient against transforms added by plugins.
• Add LGPL as an OSS license.

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 5.4.0	5.61s	74.88ms
Gutenberg 5.3.0	5.65s	73.37ms
Gutenberg 4.8 (WordPress 5.1)	8.21s	150.22ms
Gutenberg 4.7 (WordPress 5.0)	14.15s	201.27ms

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👏 Kudos to all the contributors. Thank you.

#core-editor, #editor, #gutenberg