Managing a custom taxonomy in WordPress has typically meant writing PHP — register_taxonomy() calls, capability mapping, admin UI hooks. Gutenberg 23.1 changes that for sites willing to opt into an experimental flag, alongside a second experiment for in-editor image cropping, faster bulk uploads, and new primitives for the @wordpress/ui package — Gutenberg’s emerging component library for block editor interfaces.
The first experiment adds an experimental Media Editor Modal that brings freeform cropping and image manipulation directly into the block editor. Once enabled via Gutenberg → Experiments → Media Editor Modal, a Crop icon appears in the toolbar for Image and Site Logo blocks. The modal supports zoom controls, locked-ratio resizing, and saves changes through WordPress Core’s /edit modifiers.
A second experiment introduces a Custom Taxonomies management screen under Settings → Taxonomies — the no-PHP workflow described above. With the “Content types: manage custom taxonomies” flag turned on, editors can create, edit, activate, deactivate, and delete taxonomies without writing PHP. The release includes auto-fill labels, bulk status actions, and a warning when an existing taxonomy’s slug is edited.
On the performance side, thumbnail sideload requests now run in parallel up to the existing concurrency limit, replacing the previous sequential approach. That should speed up bulk Gallery block uploads in particular, where many thumbnails are generated at once.
The @wordpress/ui package gains two new primitives: Drawer for slide-in side panels and bottom sheets, and Autocomplete for combobox-style form inputs.
The Dialog, AlertDialog, and Drawer components now support sticky headers and footers when content scrolls vertically, and all overlay *.Popup subcomponents gain a new portal prop for customizable portaling behavior.
- @wordpress/ui
- Gutenberg’s emerging component library for building block editor and admin interfaces, intended to sit alongside the older @wordpress/components package.
- @wordpress/grid
- A new, unstable package introducing layout primitives for dashboard-style admin surfaces.
- CRDT
- Conflict-free Replicated Data Type — a data structure that lets multiple people edit the same document offline and merge their changes automatically without conflicts.
- Yjs
- The CRDT library WordPress uses to power real-time collaborative editing.
The Classic block experiment has been refocused after an earlier attempt to remove TinyMCE entirely broke existing workflows that depend on it: rather than removing the editor outright, the Classic block is now hidden from the inserter while existing instances continue to function. A new wp_classic_block_supports_inserter filter lets developers control this behavior per site.
Developers also get an early preview of the @wordpress/grid package, which introduces DashboardGrid, a two-dimensional grid component with drag-to-reorder and resize handles designed for dashboard-style surfaces. The API is marked as unstable and will evolve in upcoming releases.
Real-time collaboration also gets three reliability fixes: the “Connection Lost” dialog no longer fires when too many sync rooms are registered, a size-check mismatch that rejected large Yjs updates has been corrected, and two offline users reconnecting simultaneously no longer produce a divergent document state.
Six first-time contributors had pull requests merged in this release, including fixes for image aspect ratio preservation, RTC update-size errors, and ARIA list structure in connector cards. Full release notes, including additional bug fixes, are available on Make WP Core.
