The latest WordPress release is set to hit the shelves this week and there’s been a lot of buzz in the community surrounding it. WordPress 5.0, codenamed Gutenberg, is one of the largest changes we’ve seen to the actual dashboard interface in a while. Following in the footsteps of Elementor, Visual Composer, Divi and other popular page builders, Gutenberg introduces blocks as the main method for adding content to posts and pages. The idea is to bring content creation to the masses, allowing those without coding know-how to publish beautiful websites.
While in theory, this is an exciting update to WordPress, a CMS that populates more than 30% of the entire web, there are some considerations that need to be made before jumping to hit that ‘upgrade’ button on your site. Because Gutenberg is such a drastic departure from the TinyMCE editor we’ve grown to know and love, the latest forum activity has shown it to be significantly more ‘buggy’ than previous versions. There are also numerous articles outlining how much more cumbersome certain actions are now – what used to be a simple line of code now requires numerous clicks to achieve.
The biggest issue arising is not with new sites, rather with older sites that are attempting to upgrade to Gutenberg. The WordPress plugin community is vast, and attempting to reduce plugin conflict has been a rocky road. Many users are finding their sites ‘broken’ after the update because the plugins that they are using are not compatible with Gutenberg.
Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg may have been the original content publisher, but I’d guess even he would hold off on updating his site. I’m not questioning that the future could be grand for Gutenberg, I’m just cautioning that we may not be quite there yet.
