Gutenberg 23.6 is out, and it graduates two blocks that have been sitting behind an experimental flag for a while. If you have been waiting to build an audio playlist or a tabbed layout without a third-party plugin, you can now do both using blocks built into WordPress.

Two new blocks you can use today

The Playlist block plays a list of audio tracks with artwork, track metadata, and a waveform display. You control the play order and can toggle artwork, artist names, track numbers, and track length on or off to match your page’s design.

The Tabs block organizes content into clickable tabbed sections, built to accessibility best practices so keyboard and screen reader users can navigate between tabs correctly. Each tab panel accepts any blocks you want to put inside it, and the tab buttons themselves support the usual color, font, border, and spacing controls.

Both blocks are now part of the default block library. You do not need to turn on an experimental features flag to use them anymore.

Other changes worth knowing about

The Notes feature, which lets you leave editorial comments on a post, picked up two upgrades. You can now attach a note to a specific piece of text instead of an entire block, and the highlight stays put as you keep editing around it. You can also type ”@” inside a note to mention a specific person on your team, which opens a list of site users and links directly to their profile when you pick one.

The Gallery block gained a dynamic mode that automatically displays every image attached to a post, instead of requiring you to add each image manually. You can switch back to a regular, manually curated gallery at any time without losing your settings.

Plugin and theme developers also gained an API for registering custom icon collections, so icon sets beyond WordPress’s defaults can show up in the built-in icon picker under their own tab.

Getting it

Gutenberg 23.6 is available now from the Gutenberg plugin page if you want these features before they reach WordPress core. Gutenberg 23.6 requires WordPress 6.9 or later.

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