Version 5.0 of the Gutenberg plugin was released yesterday with a new RSS block. Riad Benguella, the project’s technical lead for phase 2, published a demo of the block and its settings. Users can set the number of items displayed and also toggle on/off the author, date, and excerpt.
RSS is still relevant today as one of the linchpins of the open web and Gutenberg makes it possible to easily place a feed inside a post or page. (This feature was previously limited to widgetized areas.) The creation of this block is part of a larger effort to port all of WordPress’ existing core widgets over to blocks.
Version 5.0 also introduces a new Amazon Kindle embed block, providing an instant preview from an Amazon Kindle URL. WordPress already has oembed support of Amazon Kindle URLs but it was missing from the Embeds section of the accordion in the block inserter.
One of the most exciting additions in this release is a new FocalPointPicker for the Cover block. It allows users to visually select the ideal center point of an image and returns it as a pair of coordinates that are converted into ‘background-position’ attributes. The result is that the user has more control over how the image is cropped. This feature solves so many problems users have experienced in cropping and displaying images in their WordPress themes and content. The FocalPointPicker was created as a reusable component so that developers can use it to build other blocks with the same capabilities, providing an experience that is consistent with core.
The changes included in Gutenberg 5.0 are immediately available for those running the plugin on their sites but only for WordPress 5.0+. This release drops support for earlier versions of WordPress. The updates in Gutenberg 5.0 are planned to be rolled into WordPress 5.2.
The Focal point feature is very questionable – it promotes uploading uncropped and thus unoptimized images. Cover block still does not support responsive or adaptive images.
You can even see the issue in gif that you posted in this post – end user will have to download very tall and heavy image just to see bottom 20%.
Sure, it’s nice visually and it’s easy for site administrator to define focal point, but end user on low-end mobile network will suffer because of this.