The familiar WordPress editor has been a staple of the platform for years now. Millions of people use it every day to build new pages and posts, as well as to edit their content. It hasn’t changed much for a while now, however, and some people feel that it’s a bit outdated. For that reason (among others), the WordPress editor is on the verge of a major change with the launch of Gutenberg. This update will completely overhaul the way the editor looks and works, and it will also have a significant impact on the way you use WordPress.

In this article, we’re going to introduce you to the Gutenberg editor. Then we’ll talk about what this upcoming change means for WordPress, and for you as an Uncode user!

An introduction

Gutenberg is the code name for an ongoing project that aims to overhaul the standard WordPress editor. It was announced back in 2017, and it’s set to launch with WordPress 5.0 somewhere during 2018. This is an almost complete departure from the classic WordPress editor, but not necessarily for the worse. Aside from a cleaner interface, the major change Gutenberg brings is the addition of ‘blocks’. If you’ve ever used a page builder – such as Uncode’s – then you’ll be familiar with this concept.

In a nutshell, blocks are pre-built elements that you can add to your pages and posts, customize to meet your needs, and place wherever you’d like. Even without Gutenberg, there are a lot of ways you can add these types of modules to WordPress. In fact, many page-builder plugins and themes include them. However, this will be the first time WordPress itself is implementing this functionality.

At the moment, you can try the Gutenberg editor for yourself by checking out its plugin. Keep in mind that this plugin is still in beta, so we highly recommend that you only try it out in a testing environment. For now, though, let’s talk about what this new editor means for you.

Gutenberg status

Gutenberg is still a long way from competing with a full website builder platform. At the moment, it occupies a middle ground between a text editor and a page builder, and the functionality of blocks and of the grid is still limited. However, if there’s one thing WordPress is known for, it’s customizability. There are already a handful of plugins available that enable you to add more functionality to Gutenberg.

Once WordPress 5.0 rolls around, you can expect the floodgates to open. There will likely be hundreds of plugins available to improve the editor’s page-building tools. What’s more, Gutenberg itself should have plenty of additional functionality added in before it’s ready for release. When it launches, therefore, it might look and function quite differently from how it does now. Even so, most major plugins and themes will probably work overtime to remain compatible with any changes Gutenberg brings to the table.

Conclusion

Gutenberg is going to be a major leap forward for WordPress, even if the actual current reviews of it is telling enough about the expectations of this product (users disagree with many aspects of it and sincerely we also expected something different). Anyway once it launches, probably the platform will have taken one step closer to matching the flexibility of other site-building tools. However, Gutenberg will still largely be a content-editing tool (not a page builder), so it’s not going to be a full replacement for a powerful theme like Uncode.

We and many others feel Gutenberg is far from being release ready and the full specs have not been set yet by the WordPress core team as of yet. So with that in mind, we as well as many others are simply unsure at this time. If it will be possible for page builders in general, like the popular Visual Composer, to make use of Gutenberg as editor itself then we will of course be doing that. There might be a possibility to use the blocks API of Gutenberg and to come up with some sort of migration tool, but so far this is not known. Due to the fact that Gutenberg aims to become a reduced block editor, instead of a text editor, the other possibility would be to simply allow our customers to use Visual Composer and Gutenberg side by side. Visual Composer is a far more advanced, professional page building tool and will obviously present the much more powerful and attractive alternative.

Do you have any questions about what changes Gutenberg will bring to WordPress? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

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