Here at GLIDE, our Support portal has been buzzing with lots of big changes lately. Most hosts have upgraded servers to PHP 7.0 and beyond, while deprecating and ceasing support for older versions. Also, the WordPress Core has had lots of major updates over the past few months with the biggest change being the introduction of Gutenberg with WordPress 5.03. These advances have in turn required all major plugins to upgrade to work well and securely. We are here to help you understand these new updates and guide you through some options on keeping your site up to date and integrating the new editor into your workflows.
What is Gutenberg?
Gutenberg is a visual block editor that Automattic and the WordPress community have been working on for several years. The vision is to have more visual space on the screen to write, focus on ‘writing first’ and then be able to inset blocks on the fly to dress up the formatting and presentation of the content. In its beta version, the initial objective was to get 100,000 active installs from the community to be the early adopters and help to QA, voice frustrations and fix issues. The early feedback from the community was not positive overall so the release was delayed multiple times. However, the goal to release this editor and make WordPress more future proof progressed and is now being released in the latest core update.
The ‘classic’ WordPress editor relies on Tiny MCE technology and features a very simple interface known as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). For the most part, this only allows for vertical inline content, which has been the standard look and feel of blog style publishing…unless the user was versed in utilizing shortcodes or advanced HTML to publish content with more varied layouts.
Gutenberg Features
We’re definitely excited about some of the new Gutenberg features like tables and responsive column blocks, table of contents with anchored text links, embedding options, quote blocks and full width features. But most of all, we are excited about the prospect of being able to write our own blocks. If you’re already using a custom GLIDE template, you will be familiar with our custom shortcodes, custom field loops and flexible content pages that show off your branded designs with a concise CSS and style guide. These powerful page building tools won’t go away, but we will now be able to incorporate them with Gutenberg to make content types available globally in the theme and that’s only going to make your custom theme even more robust.
Need More Time Before Switching?
If you aren’t ready to fully embrace Gutenberg just yet, there are a couple of great plugin options to utilize while learning to use the new blocks. The Classic Editor plugin can be installed to keep your good old WYSIWYG editor at your fingertips through 2020. Additionally, the Gutenberg Ramp plugin has been put out by Automattic and allows you to determine whether to use classic OR block editor on pages, posts and even custom post types. This is a great way to continue to publish your content as you have in the past while giving you the opportunity to learn the new technology.
The UI of the new block editor can still be improved and isn’t entirely intuitive, so don’t feel intimidated if you need a little help along the way. We’re also cautiously aware that a lot of backwards compatibility will need to be tested out but we’re ambitious and ready to step up to the plate in order to harness new and improved work coming out of the WordPress community. Contact our support team if you are ready to tackle the upgrades and would like to have our experts in your corner to make sure that it all runs smoothly.
Want more information on Gutenberg? Stay tuned, we will be putting out more content on specific features and best practices very soon!