Lately, first-time website owners have opted for site builders that allow them to quickly and effortlessly create beautiful, professional websites through movable content blocks. Rather than coding a site and risk giving visitors a poor experience, these drag-and-drop site builders make it possible to create your site from start to finish without learning anything about programming. Just gather the blocks (images, social sharing buttons, website headers, etc) you need and drop them where they’re wanted.
This trend is now coming to the largest and most-used web platform in the world, WordPress! Called Gutenberg, here are 10 things you need to know about the new blog post editor.
Gutenberg is a WordPress visual editor that adds page-builder like functions. It replaces the current default content editor on WordPress. It is based on “flexible blocks” you can manage to add a wide variety of content to web pages to easily build what you want.
According to the man who started it all, Matt Mullenweg, Gutenberg has been designed to “help WordPress users to build customized page layouts, not just write articles.” Gutenberg will make it easier than ever to write content-rich posts that are beautiful to look at and read.
WordPress 5.0 was released December 6th and comes with the Gutenberg editor. Users no longer have to download and install it. Just go to your dashboard and you’ll find Gutenberg in the Posts section of the dashboard.
You can still use Gutenberg even if you use WordPress 4.9 or an earlier version. Go to the WordPress plugin repository and install the Gutenberg plug-in on your website. Installing the plug-in won’t interfere with the working of the current editor.
If you already use it, you’re seeing some of the early functionalities. The UI, ADA accessibility and features will change significantly going forward as they continue to make modifications and improvements.
You probably didn’t see this one coming. But, yes, if you have some coding skills, you’re can create your own blocks to customize your content and site layout. For instance, you can build a new widget to display your latest posts, categories, and videos.
You can temporarily stop the program and install the Classic editor plug-in to use whenever you wish and enable it again later. Or, if you’re using the Gutenberg plug-in on a WordPress site running less than 5.0, you can uninstall it all together without breaking your site. This functionality is unique to Gutenberg since nearly all the other drag-and-drop website builders don’t allow it.
The classic WordPress editor doesn’t support editing by 2 people at the same time. If someone is working on a post, the post locking feature prevents other contributors from making changes. Gutenberg is changing this. With the new editor, it’s possible for multiple contributors to simultaneously work on the same post without interrupting each other.
Unfortunately, no one knows yet. You’d imagine that WordPress or Gutenberg itself would have come out by now to calm nerves by telling users how the sweeping changes will affect old pages and posts created using the old editor. But, the issue remains unresolved.
The Gutenberg team is especially interested in VIP clients with large editorial teams and complex workflows to help them stress test the new builder.
So, that’s a wrap on the latest with WordPress introducing the major backend overall for content management going forward with Gutenberg!