Gutenberg 4.0 RC 1 Will Be Available in A Few Days

Matias Ventura, Gutenberg’s technical lead, published an update on the progress of Gutenberg 4.0 and what users can expect. This version will mark the project’s 40th release.

Ventura outlined a number of tasks that have been completed up to this point. These include, Full Screen, Unified Toolbar, and Spotlight modes to adapt to a user’s creative preferences, adaptive design, and autosave support.

The list provides a great recap of the progress that’s been made since early 2017. Gutenberg 4.0 will initially be a release candidate that will be made available in the next few days.

Due to the “Try Gutenberg” callout in WordPress 4.9.8 and the editor slowly making its way to sites on WordPress.com, the team has received a lot of feedback leading to improved iterations.

“The main feature set targeted for the first version of the editor has been considered complete for a few releases now,” Ventura said. “Since then, however, the large amount of testing being carried out and the great feedback coming from multiple venues has resulted in several further iterations and additions to continue to improve the overall experience to wider satisfaction.

“This includes things like editor modes and tweaks to the inserter, transformation, and toolbar mechanisms. That has pushed us back a little in being able to fully focus on bug fixing.”

With the initial feature set complete and the WordPress 5.0 release cycle about to begin, a merge proposal appears imminent even though specific timelines have yet to be determined.