Question: Every now and then I see a dot next to Publish or Update. What does it mean?
Answer: There’s a non-post entity update that will be saved when you publish or update.
Here’s a pretty naff simulation using similar CSS to that found in Gutenberg. I’ve put a red period with a green border that appears in front of the button.
Steps to recreate
- Start a new post
- Insert a reusable block
- Change the reusable block
.dotty::before,
.editor-post-publish-button__button.has-changes-dot::before {
border-radius: 4px;
content: ".";
height: 8px;
margin: auto 5px auto -3px;
width: 8px;
border: 2px solid green;
color: red;
}
Current status
The presence of this dot was discussed during Open Floor at the #core-editor meeting on 16th June.
It’s likely that the dot will be removed in a future version of WordPress.
I also noted some other issues related to Reusable blocks.
- The inability to insert a reusable block using the block inserter in Site Editor.
- Strange display when a reusable block is moved around an image
- A block producing an error after a certain manipulation.
Before raising issues I need to be able to reproduce each of these problems using Gutenberg and/or WordPress 5.8 with a default theme – TT1 blocks or just Twenty Twenty One.
The error…

Uncaught Error: An error occurred while running 'mapSelect': Cannot read property 'title' of undefined The error may be correlated with this previous error: TypeError: Cannot read property 'title' of undefined
This is a known bug wordpress/gutenberg#29498 with a fix provided in wordpress/gutenberg#32088