Gutenberg Will be Released with WordPress 5.0 on 19 November – Here’s What You Need to Do
We have known for the past 18 months that Gutenberg was going to one day change just about every aspect of running a WordPress site from publishing posts to designing pages.
As I explained a couple months ago, Gutenberg represents a fundamental change in the architecture of the WordPress platform. This is WordPress’s New Coke moment and will either modernize the platform or send users fleeing to the competition.
Now we know when the Gutenberg is going to happen. Earlier this week the official word came down that Gutenberg will be released with the next major release of WordPress 5.0 on 19 November.
WordPress 5.0 will be focussed on merging the Gutenberg plugin into trunk. In addition, there are two related areas of new development:
- Updating the default themes to work well with the block editor, and creating the new Twenty Nineteen theme.
- Creating an upgrade experience to remove the Gutenberg plugin and offer the Classic Editor plugin.
Given the scope of this change, there won’t be any extra feature focuses. In order to ensure that we can keep the release schedule, minor changes, and bug fixes will only be included on a case-by-case basis.
I have written about Gutenberg a couple times, so I won’t repeat myself. Instead, I will discuss what I plan to do.
My current Gutenberg mitigation plan is to do my best to avoid it for as long as possible. Yes, I fully plan to build test sites in Gutenberg in the next few weeks, and I might even build new sites for clients, but I will not be using Gutenberg with existing sites because in its current form it could wreck perfectly functional sites.
Keeping a site up and running is more important than adopting the latest shiny tech, which is why I plan to install either the Classic Editor plugin or the Disable Gutenberg plugin on all of my sites and my clients' sites.
These two plugins can each restore the older editor interface, making it possible to continue to use plugins and other customizations that depend on the previous editor.
I will be installing and testing these plugins in the weeks leading up to 19 November, and I would recommend that you do the same.
Please let me know if I can help you with this.
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