WordPress has released version 13.0 of Gutenberg, which includes many improvements that bring it closer to being an easy-to-use website builder.
This update to Gutenberg is an important milestone as the features in this plugin will be included in the core of WordPress 6.0, which is currently scheduled for release on May 24, 2022, which is very important in the publishing world.
WordPress Gutenberg Editor
Gutenberg is a visually styled website builder designed to make it easier for publishers to build websites.
It’s called visualization to describe the process of building a website using a drag-and-drop or point-and-click interface on a virtual canvas, allowing you to visualize how it will look as you design.
With this style of website building, instead of manipulating code, the publisher manipulates page elements such as headers or footers. These web page elements are called blocks.
This is a way of building websites that has existed in different forms for a long time, with the introduction of Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver website building software at least in the late 1990s.
At the time, this way of creating web pages was often referred to as a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface.
WordPress plugins such as Divi and non-WordPress SaaS website building platforms have been helping publishers build websites with a visual website builder interface for years.
Gutenberg is a WordPress version of a visual website builder interface that makes building your website easier.
The great thing about Gutenberg is that it’s part of the WordPress core itself, which (in theory) helps make sites built with Gutenberg run faster than with third-party plugins.
Gutenberg 13.0 offers several improvements that will help WordPress 6.0 be a major step forward for the publishing world, which is very exciting.
Gutenberg Neighborhood
Gutenberg’s design interface is described using the word “block”. For design purposes, web pages are divided into sections called blocks.
At the top, called the header, is a block. The navigation menu is a block. The side where the various widgets sit is also a block.
Each block can be moved and manipulated to create web designs.
Therefore, the block where the featured image at the top of the page is located can be easily styled individually with a click. Just click on the block you want to add text or a background image to and choose from the context menu to do what you want.
Select text across blocks
An innovative improvement introduced in Gutenberg 13.0 (and WordPress 6.0) is the ability to select text across multiple blocks. This is important because the presence of blocks is a way of designing the look and feel of a web page, and text is what goes into those blocks.
This new feature gives publishers more freedom to create web pages without being bound by (seemingly) arbitrary rules, such as the inability to select text across multiple blocks.
page-level mode
This is a groundbreaking feature that takes Gutenberg a big step toward becoming an easy-to-use website builder.
The patterns feature was introduced in Gutenberg version 7.8 in 2020 as an API for developers to use to create layout patterns for various parts of a page.
What the latest version of the modal feature does is enable a page template that can be selected as a starting point for creating web page layouts.
So instead of creating a web page from scratch, publishers can start with a preconfigured pattern for the entire page and customize the page from there.
This is a feature that is already common in many existing WordPress page builders as well as SaaS website builders. So WordPress finally having this feature is definitely a step forward.
stack or row layout operations
Continuing with the goal of making WordPress easy to design, the new version of Gutenberg allows to organize selected blocks into block or row layouts.
From there, publishers can use the context menu to further manipulate the design.
Here is a video showing how it works:
The WordPress announcement describes it:
“Blocks can now be easily grouped into stack layouts or row layouts with just one click.
In Gutenberg 13.0, selecting multiple blocks at once will display Stack and Row variants of the Group block in the toolbar. “
prevent border control
This is an improvement over existing functionality, with a new BorderControl component.
The context menu provides a way to control the border around the block to change the style, color, and width.
Use featured images in cover block buttons
The cover block is a specialized block that can be used to create a hero image section at the top of the page. The background of the block can be color, image or video.
An update to the cover block added a button so that it can immediately use the featured image for the web page.
It sounds like a small thing, but it’s actually an important feature.
The WordPress announcement comes with enthusiasm:
“With the updated cover block, a featured image for a post is no longer an afterthought – it’s an integral part of the post. Just click the “Use Featured Image” button and you’re done!”
Gutenberg 13.0 has more cumulative improvements that together lead to meaningful updates to the WordPress block editor that will eventually make it the next version of WordPress, version 6.0.
