Are you ready for the WordPress Gutenberg Update?

Are you ready for the WordPress Gutenberg Update? There is a lot of talk in the WordPress Community about the upcoming release of WordPress 5, and for those that don’t know, this new update will include a brand new editor that is being referred to as Gutenberg

What is the WordPress Gutenberg Update?

WordPress is one of the best content management systems you’ll ever get your hands on — and all for free. But it’s not perfect. The CMS can be difficult for new site owners to acclimate to.

The Gutenberg project is out to address an issue that has limited WordPress for a while. WordPress Gutenberg, like so many third-party plugins before it, is seeking to improve an already great product by making the design and publishing process more visual, you’ll be able to easily customize the finer details that make your site just right all inside the new visual editor. WordPress Gutenberg allows you to drag and drop blocks of content onto the page or post that you’re editing.

So far, this is all good news for site owners- they will be able to create a more complex visual design for their content, without having to know any HTML code. However, these blocks (which will be the foundation of the WordPress Gutenberg Editor) are created using newer technology (Javascript and React for those of you with a more technical interest) as opposed to the older PHP and HTML/CSS technology. This mean that they will be some compatibility clashes, and all sites will potentially have issues which will need to be addressed

So.. are you ready?

The latest news suggests that the Gutenberg new editor will be installed as the default editor at the next WordPress update (WordPress 5) This means that’s your site will automatically flip from using the existing Editor to Gutenberg, and unfortunately this could cause some problems.

What problems will it cause?

The worst case scenario is that your website will go down. There are currently over 54,000 plugins in the web press repository and many of these plugins will not be compatible with the Gutenberg editor. If you’re using any plugins which are incompatible with the Gutenberg editor, then yes, you site could go down when WordPress is updated

What can I do now to prevent my site going down?

Fortunately there is a step you can take to eliminate that scenario on the automatic update day. WordPress has released a plug-in called the Classic Editor. My advice would be for all site owners to install and activate this plugin now so that when WordPress rolls out (apparently due sometime this fall) you won’t automatically be using the Gutenberg editor, and will avoid the acute site-crash on update

Once the initial update has taken place (.. and maybe wait a few days for any problems and patches to be resolved and released), you can test how your site works with the new editor (if you have a hosting solution that provides a staging site, you could test it out of the production environment, or perhaps you could ask your developer to test it on a cloned site on your behalf?)

If you site is being looked after by Nustart Solutions WordPress Care, we have already installed this plugin

With the testing on a staging environment, the problems can be flushed out, and either resolved, or the plugin can be replaced with a plugin that does work with Gutenberg

Why can’t I just leave my WordPress site alone, and not update it?

This will leave your core files, themes and plugins open to attack – each time core, themes and plugins are updated, the documentation for the security holes they’ve fixed is released to the public. Any site that is not updated is not only vulnerable but now the documentation is readily available to help any hacker find access to any site that hasn’t been updated.

Updates to WordPress are crucial and should be done as often as possible. Becoming a responsible website owner takes work. For any of our WordPress Care Customers – we have already installed the classic editor, and are ready to start testing your site as soon as the update is released

Hopefully you have found this information useful – if you are in any way worried about any of this, and want some professional help with getting ready for Gutenberg (before and after the update) – please don’t hesitate to contact us via the form below, and we will be happy to help you out