Gutenberg for WordPress is coming.
James Miodonski 6th of August 2018
December 2018: We’re live, folks. Read our WordPress 5.0 blog post here.
A major change is coming with the next release of WordPress in the form of a brand new editor platform. Named Gutenberg – after the founder of movable print, widely held as the key player behind the Printing Revolution in the 1400s – it looks like it may be equally as disruptive to our content management platform of choice.
Given that 31% of the internet now runs on WordPress, this isn’t a minor thing.
If you’ve logged into your WordPress dashboard in the previous week or so, you may have seen this notice on your dashboard:
This is part of WordPress’s drive to move developers and users into adoption of the new system. The presumption here is that users will adapt to the new editor early, and developers will, in turn, move to support the new editor in future sites.
However. Here at Creatomatic, we’re of the opinion that the system is, in the words of the great Grolsch advert, Not Ready Yet. Here’s why:
- Post meta fields are not supported. For the uninitiated, if your site has extra data attached to posts and pages – like dates, links, or any custom elements – it won’t display with Gutenberg.
Yoast is not supported by the system, although they’re working on it. If you use Yoast for SEO, you won’t be able to do this on your content with Gutenberg just yet.Since this was written, Yoast 8.0 has released, which supports the Gutenberg sidebar.- Custom post types don’t upgrade to Gutenberg by default – so you’ll be left with two separate editors in the system.
- Our own additional functionality will need rewritten for Gutenberg. For instance, our popular column editor; button links; H3 dropdown blocks: none of these are supported yet.
So – in short, we would recommend that you hold off integrating the plugin for the moment, and dismiss the dashboard notification right now.
If you’ve already jumped ahead and installed it – and are suffering buyers remorse – don’t panic! Just go to Plugins; find ‘Gutenberg’; and click ‘Deactivate’. It won’t cause any harm to the system in any case.
