Gutenberg, and Planning for WordPress 5.0

There has been a lot of conversation within the WordPress community that is causing developers near and far to plan and strategize for the after-effects of the Gutenberg release. Gutenberg is a MAJOR new feature that has been in development for over a year, Gutenberg is coming with the release of WordPress 5.0 and is the largest initiative that has been merged into the core of the open-source project. Here’s some details on Gutenberg and how Graphic Lux is planning for it.

What is Gutenberg?

“Gutenberg is newly developed, block-oriented editor.  WordPress already supports a large amount of “blocks”, but doesn’t surface them very well, nor does it give them much in the way of layout options. By embracing the blocky nature of rich post content, we will surface the blocks that already exist, as well as provide more advanced layout options for each of them.

Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage. The idea combines concepts of what in WordPress today we achieve with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.” – Read more about this here.

To get an idea of what Gutenberg looks like and how it affects the way users will interact with it, we recommend watching this demonstration of the tool from December’s WordCamp US.

What does Graphic Lux think of Gutenberg?

We love WordPress because of its solid foundation that it has for all web development projects. The WordPress Core software allows us the ability to extend and customize for every website development project we have. Gutenberg is an exciting new way to create and manage content in WordPress. This new feature ships with some great core blocks and, of course, we can easily extend Gutenberg to give our clients a truly customized experience that fits their needs exactly. We are very excited about the future of WordPress including the new content experience provided by Gutenberg.  That being said, we usually like to see things like these work themselves out before we start implementing anything.

Will Gutenberg affect your WordPress website?

This is a hard question to answer because each of our clients’ websites are different in how they work and how they are built.  We do believe that 99% of our clients’ will see no issues but we do want everyone to be aware and to actively watch when WordPress 5.0 comes out to review their websites and submit a support ticket if there are any issues.

If you have a WordPress Care/Maintenance Plan with us, we can quickly roll-back any issues caused when Gutenberg is launched by pushing out your site’s latest nightly backup. This will put your site back to the way it was until work can be done to align Gutenberg’s changes with your theme. Whether you have a care/maintenance plan or not, we’re here to help if Gutenberg affects how your site looks or works. Let us know by submitting a support ticket, and we’ll have a repair estimate ready for you right away. Big changes to software platforms like WordPress can sometimes seem a little bit daunting, but here at Graphic Lux, we’re excited and ready to help make this a smooth, positive transition.