Gutenberg 23.3 introduces a set of updates, including a new experimental dashboard redesign that supports drag-and-drop interactions for adding, moving, resizing, and rearranging widgets in the admin interface. The release also brings changes to media handling, block styling, and initially included a React 19 upgrade that was later reverted due to compatibility issues.
The new dashboard and its architecture
The new dashboard experience is available as an experimental feature and can be enabled from Gutenberg > Experiments by selecting “New Dashboard experience.”
The new dashboard arrives with a set of widgets such as, Welcome, Quick Draft, Activity, Site Health, Site Preview, and News.
The dashboard also includes layout controls that let users switch between standard grid and masonry views, adjust the number of columns displayed, and configure how tiles are arranged on narrower screens.
Damián Suárez described the effort as “a customizable WordPress dashboard — a widget-based surface users can arrange, resize, and compose.”
He also outlined the architecture, “ The dashboard is composed of three layers, each depending only on the layer below. Identity (what a widget is) is decoupled from wiring (how a widget reaches a given page’s import map), which keeps widget types reusable across surfaces — dashboards, sidebars, plugin panels, future screens.”
The build process is described as discovering available widgets and generating a registry. The data layer then handles how these widgets are made available across surfaces: “The data layer (@wordpress/widget-types) populates a surface-agnostic store and exposes a helper for surfaces to wire widget modules into their page’s import map. Each surface opts in by hooking its own page filter; the data layer never names a specific page.”
The work is based on the proposal outlined by Matías Ventura (Lead Architect of Gutenberg) and can also be referenced back to the WordPress 7.0 Product Review Meeting with Matt Mullenweg, where they discussed improving the dashboard.
Another change in this version includes a new Media editor modal that becomes the default cropping experience in the Block Editor, replacing the existing inline cropping tool. The new experience brings together freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, rotation controls, and metadata editing in a single workflow.
Gutenberg update to React 19 reverted
Gutenberg version 23.3 initially introduced React 19 support, which was later reverted in the Gutenberg 23.3.2 release. After Gutenberg 23.3.0 shipped with the upgrade, developers discovered that a number of plugins built for React 18 did not work correctly and often crashed.
Although React 18 and 19 have minimal API differences, incompatibilities emerged at the runtime level.
Jarda Snajdr said the team would need to “devise a better, less naive and more incremental upgrade strategy,” pointing to plans for an experimental feature flag to switch between React 18 and 19, along with a compatibility layer for existing plugins.
He said React 18 was restored in Gutenberg 23.3.2 to provide “time and breathing room” to reassess and test the upgrade approach, while confirming that the transition to React 19 is still planned for WordPress 7.1.
Besides these changes, the release also introduces responsive styles for block instances, several bug fixes, enhancements, and accessibility improvements.