Gutenberg (or WordPress 5.0) is now live…
December 6, 2018, WordPress.org will update the core of WordPress with the new editor, ‘Gutenberg’.
It’s a little controversial and makes some big changes to how the ‘back end’ of your WordPress site will look once you have updated WordPress. Your hosting company may delay updating the new version of WordPress until later (often predicted to be January 2019) to give the various people and organisation in the WordPress community a chance to debug it. So, you may find it’s the same for a bit and then changes in a few months, depending on the hosting you use.
We’ve rounded up some helpful links so you can get some background, find some tutorials and prepare yourself. We’ll also be running some meetups about this in 2019 – so join WordPress Cambridge Meetup and get notified of all our meetings.
Some links that may help you
- Get the official intro from WordPress.org itself
- Get some background and intro from Yoast – the popular and respected SEO plugin
- Gutenberghub, tutorials and intros
- WPTavern has a section on Gutenberg
- wordpress.tv also has a whole section of WordCamp videos on the topic of Gutenberg
- GoGutenberg is another source of tutorials
Disabling Gutenberg while you learn a bit more…
If you want to wait a bit longer and learn a bit more about it before taking the plunge you can disable Gutenberg and stick with the old-style editor by using a plugin
WordPress Cambridge – learn more at our meetups
WordPress Cambridge has a forthcoming meeting where you can bring your own questions, concerns, and ask other people who are there – or you can be someone who gets up and answers or makes suggestions to others! It’s on December 10 2018 at the Bradfield Centre and you can see details on our meetup.com site.
WordPress Cambridge members chip in…
Simon Jones from Cambridge-based Studio24 wrote a blog post on Gutenberg and says:
Personally I would strongly not recommend people update to this straight away. Most commercial hosting companies are likely to wait until they update sites (I’ve been told WP Engine don’t plan to roll out 5.0 until Jan). By mid-Jan there will be bug releases and plugins like ACF (which is not currently 100% compatible) should be stable.
He provides the following useful links for background:
Yoast on how Gutenberg isn’t ready quite yet… And a post by esteemed plugin authors, ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) on a similar note.
Though they have also both published some useful blogs recently:
Yoast on the question of whether you should update to Gutenberg (also known as WordPress 5.0) and Yoast on ‘pressing questions’ that remain about Gutenberg. In addition, ACF produced a blog ‘the night before’ Gutenberg giving their most recent views.
And don’t forget to check out Simon Jones’ own blog post.
Jonathan Whiteland of YTKO, and an active member of WordPress Cambridge, is proceeding cautiously too – scaling back the eagerness of his nightly auto-updating scripts and looking out for plugin problems too.
We’ll add more links – get in touch via WordPress Cambridge Meetup if you have something to contribute.