Gutenberg: What It Means For WordPress And What You Need To Do

If you’ve been actively following the development of WordPress over the past 18 months, you’ll know Gutenberg is a big deal. For those who are not familiar, Gutenberg is the new editing system for WordPress posts and pages. In fact, in their own words, “Gutenberg is more than just an editor”. The initial version in 5.0 (released December 6, 2018) will essentially lay the groundwork for a whole new experience of creating and publishing content.

“While the publisher is the focus right now, the Armenia Email List project will ultimately have an impact on the entire publishing experience, including personalization (the next area of ​​focus). ”

As a hosting company that oversees thousands of WordPress websites, we believe this is an overwhelmingly positive move. Gutenberg may take a little while for each bell and whistle to be fine-tuned and available, but we’ve seen it used at a number of production sites before.

This is certainly a good thing for the long-term future of WordPress, especially since content these days isn’t just an image and a few paragraphs of text (unless it’s our blog!). Shifting to a more compatible and extensible system with complex content will improve both the developer and end-user experience.

So what is different?

As soon as you start using Gutenberg, you’ll instantly see the differences. While the old editor treated everything like a large field of text, Gutenberg breaks it down into blocks. Before that, this meant that systems trying to add complex functionality had to use confusing shortcodes all over the place or use WordPress in ways that were not designed. This would cause issues with upgrades or when plugins were disabled, leaving sites in semi-broken states.

It’s also very extensible, with hundreds of plugins already available providing additional functionality. This will increase very quickly over the next 12 months as plugin and theme developers adapt to the new system.
What is the name ?

The system is named after Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. Like the original printing press, Gutenberg aims to redevelop and improve your editing experience.
What do I have to do?

Gutenberg will be fully integrated in version 5.0 and simply known as the “editor”. If you don’t want to change anything, WordPress has released a Classic Editor plugin, which will be supported by WordPress itself until 2022.

We strongly encourage you to create an intermediate copy of your WordPress site and simply give Gutenberg a try. For simple sites, there may be no work required, just the learning curve to get used to the new editor.

You can start playing right now with a demo editor, available here:

For sites where you have already tested Gutenberg and installed it on your site, version 5.0 will continue to function normally .

If you have not yet tried Gutenberg to test for compatibility with your site, we recommend that you wait for version 5.0.1 and create an intermediate copy now to test.

What if I’m already using a visual editor?

We expect that over time, many visual editors for WordPress will align with Gutenberg’s new block-based system. There is still a mountain of work to do for them to do this, but in the longer term, it should also offer visual builder developers a much more complete system on which to base their improvements.
Visual composer
Is everything compatible?

Not yet. There is still quite a bit of work to be done for many third-party plugins and themes to ensure 100% compatibility. Conetix suggests making an intermediate copy of your site to give you a copy of your site to edit and modify without affecting your main website.

If you haven’t tried Gutenberg to test compatibility yet, we recommend that you wait for version 5.0.1.
What if I don’t like Gutenberg or it’s not compatible with my site?

WordPress included the classic editor as a plugin, which means you can keep backward compatibility with the original editor. This will be supported until 2022, so you have years of support to do things the old fashioned way.

If you just don’t like Gutenberg, we strongly encourage you to continue using it on a staging site to see if any of the issues you encountered have been resolved. The progress and rate of change up to version 4.9.8 was quite fast, with a lot of bugs fixed every week.