We’re days away from Gutenberg being part of every single WordPress worldwide. Yes, that means over 31% of the internet. So what’s that all fuss about and should you be scared?
What is Gutenberg
Gutenberg is a new way of editing content in WordPress. The current WordPress editor that you know has been with WordPress in a different state almost since the beginning. About a year ago Matt Mullenweg has announced that WordPress community will completely rewrite the popular WYSIWYG into a completely new block experience. The new editor will be actually What You See Is What You Get (did you know that’s what WYSIWYG stands from?). You can play with a new editor on the official Gutenberg demo site.
Fast forward a year later, after thousands of iterations of development, thousands of bugs and features solved, this month Gutenberg feature changes have been officially locked and Gutenberg has been announced ready for release.
When will Gutenberg be released?
Gutenberg is now officially ready for release, which means very soon it will become part of WordPress core. As of today, the “go live” date is at the end of August 2018 and that will be WordPress 5.0 release containing new Gutenberg editor. However, in the next week or two Gutenberg will be introduced to every WordPress user in the update 4.9.8. This update will have an extra “Try Gutenberg” callout where users will be encouraged to install Gutenberg and try on their new website or install standard editor in order to switch off Gutenberg when updating to version 5.0
Will the update affect me?
If you’re a WordPress website owner, the answer is yes. After WordPress 5.0 every website will have Gutenberg built in. How will it affect you depends on how your website is built and what theme you’re using. At FutureLab we follow WordPress coding standards in order to prevent our customers from future updates like this. Nonetheless, each and one of our customer’s websites will be manually updated to version 5.0 to test whether it works with Gutenberg. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that everything will work smoothly, that is why it’s very important to have a backup of your website and make sure you have a support team handy for any troubleshooting.
What is the future of Gutenberg and WordPress?
As much as we’re scared about the implications of WordPress 5.0 update at the end of August, we’re very excited about Gutenberg. We’ve been working with Gutenberg for over 3 months now and are due to release the first website made on blocks only next week. We’ve prepared our processes and trained our programmers to follow the new editor structure.
We feel that this is yet the biggest update to WordPress ever and it will create unlimited opportunities for content creation. It is important to understand that Gutenberg is not a page builder (and we can’t really see that it will become one day) but it’s an advanced content builder. With the right blocks, the sky is the limit for the content build. We’ve already made our own blocks with buttons, images and other elements matching the design and are very excited how easy it is to edit the design elements for the website admin. If your developer is using Gutenberg and will style each of the blocks in the right way for your design, you can change the structure of your content in any way and keep your end user excited about the progress of your website.
