For many years, WordPress has been the leading system for website content management and today it is still growing rapidly as a market leader. However, WordPress is about to change. WordPress core developers have been working hard on a new structure for building websites and they are calling it ‘Gutenberg’.
In the coming months ‘Gutenberg’ will be released as the standard for WordPress installations and it will introduce a new page/post editor in the form of a page builder. If you are a non-profit or business that uses WordPress for their website, you should know how it is going to affect you – and this article does just that.
What is Gutenberg?
Gutenberg is a new system which works similar to website giants like WIX or Weebly but keeping the freedom and simplistic approach in WordPress the same. The current editor in WordPress known as the ‘Classic Editor’ is showing its age now and this is why the WordPress team is introducing a new way to blog.
With no drag and drop functionality, the classic editor can get incredibly cluttered with plugin features and the general user experience of the editor is poor – especially for a leading Content Management System in 2018.
Gutenberg is the solution for all of this!
When Gutenberg is released instead of writing your pages and blogs all in one giant block of text or code, you will be writing content in rearrangeable ‘blocks’.
How will it affect your business?
- Forcing you to learn a new system
Because Gutenberg is a completely new way to construct blogs and pages in WordPress, you and your business will have to learn the new way to do it and that can be time constraining and a bit tedious. This can all lead to feeling a little lost when you first get your hands on Gutenberg.
When you look around after Gutenberg has been installed, you will notice that formatting controls, plugins and widget settings have moved. However, even more significantly, the whole ‘philosophy’ of the user interface will have changed. Learning the way Gutenberg manages content with its multiple moving ‘blocks’ will be a big learning curve for many.
- Making some plugins useless
Most major plugin developers and teams are already prepped for the release of Gutenberg later this year. However, many smaller developers who release plugins will not be and already we are starting to notice that some providers will be ditching their WordPress support!
But which ones? Some plugins that have settings on post editing pages may disappear, break or have reduced functionality until they are fully Gutenberg compatible. In contrast, others like Yoast and Gravity Forms are already primed and ready for the upcoming changes.
What are the positives?
So, with all this negative notion, what are some of the positives we can take from the introduction of Gutenberg? There are actually loads of upsides to using the new system believe it or not.
- Increased productivity
While everyone is working hard to get ready for Gutenberg, there are upsides to the new features. Gutenberg’s new user interface will allow you to write posts and pages much quicker in comparison to the current editor.
Formatting options, text and widgets is much quicker with it all being in the same section as well as rearranging your content is much faster.
- Layouts and Blocks
Gutenberg introduces a better way to construct pages. This being the core reasoning behind the update. You can split your content up into rows and columns giving you more freedom as well as a new set of alignment option – which is a step forward for WordPress.
Not only that, but it gives developers to create their own blocks in their plugins and themes which is a fantastic feature as this brings the elimination to complex and often confusing shortcodes in most cases.
Still confused or worried?
Our team at Digital Storm have been researching and working on Gutenberg for the past couple of months since it emerged in the community. We can ensure your website transitions into the new age of WordPress smoothly. We’ll update your website to 5.0 when it is released, ensure all your plugins and theme is compatible and give you a hands-on tutorial on how to use the new Gutenberg editor amongst other features WordPress is including.
Give us a quick call or send us an email and our friendly team will be able to help.
Useful Links:
I have collated a couple of useful links that you may find useful, to help you understand Gutenberg more.
Editor Technical Overview – https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/01/17/editor-technical-overview/
Gutenberg Preview – https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
Gutenberg Design Principles – https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/handbook/contributors/design/