WordPress 5.0 has just been released and at Presshost we’ve been busy updating sites as part of our Managed WordPress hosting service.
This update introduces a new editor to WordPress, replacing the TinyMCE editor that has been included since its inception and is already proving to be divisive within the WordPress community
Gutenberg, named after Johannes Gutenberg, who invented a movable type printing press over than 500 years ago, is one of the biggest changes to WordPress ever. It is an attempt to address the rise in object based editors, both for WordPress (such as Divi), or external services such as Wix.
Divi is a popular theme that makes it easy to create content within WordPress but it does it in such a way that it makes it difficult to change themes, which is traditionally one of the strengths of WordPress and is, in my opinion a reason to avoid using it.
Gutenberg feels like an attempt to emulate the ease in which content can be created in Divi, without ruining backwards compatibility, and this is not an easy task to do. As such, Gutenberg has three levels of implementation currently planned with the first version released in WordPress 5
Does Gutenberg work?
I have played around with Gutenberg on our development server prior to WordPress 5.0 and found it quite easy to use. There are a few things that do not work as well as I would have expected but generally it’s quite a good editor. It’s important to remember that this is a big change and people tend to be a little resistant to these kind of changes.
Because of this, WordPress has made available the Classic Editor as a plugin if you want to keep things the way they were.
So does Gutenberg work? For now the answer to this “yes, but…”
Where Gutenberg works
There are a number of new features included, such as more embedded content, widgets within content and the ability to save blocks to be used again.
What’s not working yet
I am finding that columns do not work as well as I would like, I’ve attempted to add them into the page and they’ve not placed themselves quite how I wanted. I’m also finding that it’s breaking the WYSIWYG functionality of the custom fields block our framework uses to get content above the title (something that’s needed quite often on business sites).
Presshost have installed and activated the Classic Editor by default…
My view is they rushed this out. They made a commitment to have Gutenberg in WordPress by version 5 and an aim to have version 5 out before the end of 2018, but there are still a number of issues that haven’t fully been addressed in development forums.
As a result, there are a lot of WordPress users who are not happy. I understand that big changes are always going to have detractors, but currently in the WordPress plugin repository, Gutenberg (which was released as a plugin for developers to try out in their WordPress sites prior to 5.0) has a 2.2 star rating, where as the new ‘Classic Editor’ plugin has 4.9 stars and has over a million downloads.
It is for this reason that we’ve installed and activated the classic editor by default on all our Managed WordPress hosting accounts.
Want to try Gutenberg? Just disable the Classic Editor in plugins.
