WordPress 5.0: The Gutenberg Editor and the Promise of A New Way to Edit
Posted on December 5, 2018
By now you’ve likely heard about WordPress Gutenberg, the new post editor that will be rolled out with the 5.0 release of WordPress (scheduled for tomorrow 12/6). The new editor has been under development for almost two years!
“Gutenberg is more than an editor. While the editor is the focus right now, the project will ultimately impact the entire publishing experience including customization.”
The Gutenberg Team
That’s pretty exciting news. There have been some rumblings (both positive and negative) around Gutenberg, though, and I’d like to address a few.
WordPress Gutenberg + Existing Themes = Oh no?
As far as we can see, there’s no need for alarm. Gutenberg appears to be solid, and most themes will “just work” with it. The sky won’t fall, and it’s doubtful that things will “just break” for anyone upon upgrading. But the caveat is that — like with any new application — there are no hard and fast guarantees with Gutenberg.
We have tested all our actively supported themes on WordPress 5.0. As far as your 9seeds Genesis Child theme is concerned you can safely update to WordPress 5.0 and start using the fancy new block-based editor.
If you want to stay locked into the old editor, there’s a plugin called Classic Editor for that too. Install that plugin first, then update to WordPress 5.0 and you won’t even see the new editor.
Gutenberg Uncertainties
If it seems like most people are hedging where Gutenberg support is concerned, that’s because there’s still a lot of grey area when it comes to plugins.
Most major plugins have updated, like WordPress SEO and
Where Things Stand Right Now
The good news is that Gutenberg is a much better writing experience than the old TinyMCE based editor. Further, the possibility for new even more amazing customizations to the editor are now possible. The new editor is the foundation of a dynamic change to the way that WordPress websites get built.
You might have seen a lot of negative reviews of Gutenberg early on: our team was simultaneously critical of and excited by it in the early days. The Gutenberg editor has turned the corner and reached the first handoff in what is an existing relay race.
“The editor will create a new page- and post-building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or ‘mystery meat’ embed discovery.”
Matt Mullenweg
So Where Does That Leave 9seeds Theme Support?
The most important thing to keep in mind is that Gutenberg isn’t going to break our existing themes.
There are things we can do to enhance our themes to work better with WordPress Gutenberg, but the list of those things still isn’t definitive. We have already begun to update the latest and most popular of our child themes with this level of enhancement, and there is much more to come.
Rest assured we are actively working with Gutenberg and not just adding basic support to existing themes, but building exciting new themes with the new functionality.
