As you may have heard, the controversial WordPress 5.0 has officially been released to the public. Read on below to learn more about what’s changed and what we’re doing to ensure your site is 5.0 ready.
What’s New
Gutenberg is the name of the new editor that has been introduced in the latest major release of WordPress. The long-standing WYSIWYG editor is being phased out in favor of a new “block editor.” While the new block editor has more features for drafting content, it also comes with a brand new interface that can change the way that many plugins have operated for years — thus giving the latest update its controversial status.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the editor is intended to make it easier for you to add rich content to your blog, and it does! The post you’re reading now was drafted and published using the new block editor. With so many new options, you can now easily create columns of content, place images in a more meaningful way, and embed media from a variety of new sources — all by just adding a simple block.
So what’s the drawback? Compatibility. This new editor requires a whole new set of formatting options in your WordPress theme. If your theme was custom built, that needs to be manually added in. Third party themes that are actively maintained by the developers will be updated soon if they haven’t already been. In the mean time, the classic editor plugin can be installed on your site to prevent any disruptions. This is especially important to have installed if your website has any custom post types that don’t use the default editor, but instead rely on multiple backend fields called metaboxes. While the new block editor does retain support for metaboxes, the layout can be less efficient and much more difficult to navigate.
What We’re Doing
If your website is maintained and hosted by Double Up, we’ve got you covered. Every website has been outfitted with the classic editor plugin to ensure that your editing experience will not change as a result of this update. As far as the timeline for the actual update goes, we’re holding off until the beginning of 2019 before sending the 5.0 update through. This gives us time to analyze and test the latest version of WordPress to ensure that updates go as smoothly as possible.
If you’re anxious to try out the new editor, send us a message and let’s talk about what it will take to get you up and running with Gutenberg. For websites that we built, our average update time is about 1 hour. Any websites developed by another company that were brought over to our hosting platform are likely to take longer.
Rest assured that your website is in good hands with the Double Up Digital team and this latest WordPress release won’t get in the way of your day-to-day operations.
Not sure if your website is WordPress 5.0 ready? Contact us for a free website audit.
