Gutenberg 16.0 was released today with page management now available inside the Site Editor. This is the first step towards a more unified experience of editing both content and design.
Users can now create new pages and view page details in the sidebar, an experience that is very similar to editing a page in the block editor except it keeps the process inside the flow of design editing.
“This means you can practically build out a website without leaving the Site Editor, which speeds up the site creation process, makes it easier to see what the final result will look like, and reduces the overall cognitive load of switching between editors,” Automattic-sponsored core contributor Nick Diego said.
This update to the Site Editor will be available in the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release, along with the Details block, which has been stabilized in Gutenberg 16.0 and is no longer under the Experimental flag. The implementation was scaled back to be more simple by including the summary as part of the block itself.
The Command Center, created to be an extensible quick search for jumping to other pages or templates inside the editor, has come out of the experimental stage as well in Gutenberg 16.0. This is another major feature coming to core in the next release, and its API is also now public, opening the possibility for developers to create custom commands.
A few other user-facing highlights in this release of the plugin include the following:
- Unlinked spacing controls have been optimized and condensed to take up less space in the settings UI
- Block spacing and layout controls added to Post Template block, so users can control the space between posts inside the editor
- Improvements to List View that make it easier to drag to the top and bottom-most positions
- Add
deleteaction for pages in navigation sidebar
Check out the release post for more details on all the enhancements, bug fixes, and tooling, accessibility, and performance updates included in Gutenberg 16.0.
Sorry to say but Gutenberg is too complicated to work with and hard to find the tools because they are hidden when not in use. Another very annoying thing is that different things flash when you move the mouse over. I use both Gutenberg and Classic. It is considerably faster to post with Classic, so I use it automatically when something is to be posted. I don’t understand Gutenberg in widget at all.