Gutenberg 10.0 was released on February 17, 2021. This is the 100th release of the Gutenberg plugin. This is a significant milestone and a good point to reflect on a project that was first announced at WordCamp US 2016.
What’s in Gutenberg 10.0?
Most of the “action” in Gutenberg 10.0 is in Experiments. The core team is pushing Full Site Editing features forward with a goal to release an initial version as part of the WordPress core platform later this year. This release does include a couple of new features, API updates, and bug fixes. Performance metrics continue to improve.
The news features in this release include:
- Add basic pages block. (28265)
- Make the parent block selector visible and offset in the block toolbar. (28598) (28721)
You can read the entire Gutenberg 10.0 announcement here.
Reflections from the Core Team
Riad Benguella (@youknowriad) from Automatic shared his perspective in a post titled Reflecting on Gutenberg’s 100th Release. He reflects on the genesis, scope, challenges, and progress that have been made from the first release through Gutenberg 10.0.
“ Gutenberg was (and is) an audacious project. With a project this big, it attracted a lot of attention, and it became difficult to discern constructive debate from mere opposition. We each come with our context, and some people had a fixed idea about what they wanted for the project. Some wanted to reuse an existing page builder, others wanted to revive the Fields API project, some wanted it to be front-end-first, others wanted it just to replace the classic editor’s content area, some wanted it to be in Vue.JS, others wanted no change at all. With a product used by 40% of the web, you hope to find consensus, and when compromises have to be made, it can be difficult for those involved to avoid feeling that their voice is being ignored.”
Riad Benguella
You can read Riad’s entire post here.
Assessment from Outcome Labs Team
Our team evaluates each Gutenberg release to understand the new features and improvements. We map how they will impact our own sites and our clients. We focus on identifying breaking changes and how to resolve them. We identify changes to our own workflows and our clients’ workflows to optimize the use of the new features.
Two new features were added to Gutenberg with Gutenberg 10.0. If you have nested blocks, you now get a parent selector when you hover over a child block. This is a nice productivity improvement. See the example below.
A new Pages List block was also added. This block dynamically lists all published pages on a site. It can be embedded on a Navigation block or used stand-alone. It still looks to have some issues and we think the use of this new core block will be limited versus other options.
We are testing Full Site Editing on an ongoing basis. We are planning a set of posts to start covering key elements of this new capability. Please follow our posts about the Block Editor, our social channels or sign up for email notifications to stay current.
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