Gutenberg 7.3 has received 159 contributions from 56 contributors. This includes some changes to the navigation block, including the ability to add text and background colors. Furthermore, block collections api has been added as well as placeholder blocks for post elements.
Additional improvements have been made for improving the editors speed. The team reduced total load time from 6.431 seconds in version 7.2 to 4.55 seconds in version 7.3. Input events saw larger improvements. Events in 7.3 take 33.8 milliseconds in comparison to 64.7 milliseconds in 7.2.
Navigation Block Improvements
The Navigation block saw some fixes and new options. For instance previous iterations of the navigation block had issues with bolding and italicizing text. The options simply didn’t work and this has since been fixed.
New options were also added allowing you to change the text color and the background color of the navigation block. While this is just a basic implementation it does make the block a bit more useful.
I am struggling to find a solid use case for the navigation block at this time and when full site editing is launched I am still skeptical. If you have been using the navigation block let me know in the comments below.
Placeholder Post Element Blocks
The team has added Post Author, Post Date, and Post Excerpt blocks. These are placeholder blocks at the moment but the final goal is for these to output post content.
The long term goal is to effectively converrt every important template tag into a block including author, post date, title, and much more. You can test these features by enabling full site editing in the gutenberg experiments screen.
Closing Thoughts
The Gutenberg team is making great improvements and really is working towards their goal of making “a lot more blocks”. Gutenberg has seen a lot of improvement and I am glad to see that active development is still under way.
