5.9.0 RC1

Features

• Allow grouping/ungrouping blocks using the Group block.

Enhancements

• Improve the selection of inner blocks: Clickthrough selection.
• Introduce the snackbar notices and use them for the save success notices.
• Use consistent colors in the different menus items.
• Consolidate the different dropdown menus to use the DropdownMenu component.
• Expand the prefered-reduced-motion support to all the animations.
• Add a subtle animation to the snackbar notices and provide new React hooks for media queries.
• Redesign the Table block placeholder.
• Always show the side inserter on the last empty paragraph block.
• Widgets Screen:
  • Add the in progress state to the save button.
  • Add the RichText Format Library.
• Improve the Group and Ungroup icons.
• The Spacer block clears all the previous floated blocks.

Bug Fixes

• Focus the Button block’s input upon creation.
• Prevent Embed block crashes when used inside locked containers.
• Properly center the default appender placeholder.
• Correct default appender icon transition jump in Safari.
• Only apply appender margins when the appender is inside of a block.
• Avoid loading reusable blocks editor styles in the frontend.
• Correct position of the "Remove Featured Image" button on small screens.
• Allow the legacy widget block to render core widgets.
• A11y:
  • Fix wrong tab order in the data picker component.
  • Remove the access keyboard shortcuts from the Format Library.
• Bail early in createUpgradedEmbedBlock for invalid block types.
• Fix DateTimePicker styles when used outside the WordPress context.
• Prevent the Spacer block from being deselected when resized.
• Remove the word breaking from the Media & Text block.
• Keep the seconds value untouched when editing dates using the DateTimePicker component.
• Fix tooltips styles specificity.
• Fix php errors happening when calling get_current_screen.

Various

• Introduce useSelect and useDispatch hooks to the data module.
• Adding embedded performance tests to the repository.
• Support the full plugin release process in the automated release tool.
• Speed up the packages build tool script and the Gutenberg plugin build config.
• Extract media upload logic part into a new @wordpress/media-utils package.
• Introduce Milestone-It Github Action to auto-assign milestones to merged PRs.
• Move the transformStyles function to the block-editor package to use in the widgets screen.
• Allow plugin authors to override the default anchor attribute definition.
• Add overlayColor classname to cover blocks editor markup.
• Skip downloading chromium when building the plugin zip.
• Add an e2e test to check the heading colors feature.
• Lint the ESlint config file (meta).
• Fix i18n ESlint rules and use them in the Gutenberg setup.
• Fix error in the plugin release tool when switching branches.
• Remove unused stylesheet file.
• Improve the setup of the WordPress packages package.json files.
• Remove the use of popular plugins in e2e tests.
• Ignore linting files located in build folders by default.
• Add default file patterns for the lint command of @wordpress/scripts.
• Extract the ServerSideRender component to an independent package.
• Refactor the HoverArea component as a React Hook instead.
• Remove useless dependency from the @wordpress/edit-post package.
• Deprecate components/selectors and actions moved to the editor package.
• Update browserslist dependency.

Documentation

• Document the remaining APIs of the data module.
• Add an ESNext example to the i18n docs.
• Fix inline docs and add tests for color utils.
• Document missing MenuItem prop.
• Typos and tweaks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Mobile

• Fix caret position when splitting text blocks.
• Fix the initial value of the “Open in New Tab” toggle.
• Fix Video block crash on drawing on Android.
• Fix caret position after inline paste.
• Focus the RichText component on block mount.
• Port KeyboardAvoidingView, KeyboardAwareFlatList and ReadableContentView to the @wordpress/components package.
• Fix press of Enter on post title.
• Move the native unit tests to the Gutenberg repository.
• Improve the styling of the Quote block.
• Share RichText line separator logic between web and native implementations.
• Fix Video block showing a black background when upload is in progress or upload has failed.
• Allow passing a style prop to the Icon component.
• Enable sound on the Video block.
• Start playback immediately after video goes full screen.
• Fix mobile quotes insertion and removal of empty lines.
• Move unselected block accessibility handling to block-holder.
• Make the More block ready-only.
• Fix crash when deleting all content of RichText based block.
• Fix for extra BR tag on Title field on Android.
• Open Video, Quote and More blocks to public.