WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg announced on Monday that the latest version of the WordPress platform — 5.0, which features the highly-divisive Gutenberg editor — is now scheduled to be released on Thursday, the day before the company’s WordCamp Conference begins.
Why it matters
With a new block editor and Twenty Nineteen theme, WordPress reports its 5.0 / Gutenberg release will be the platform’s major release of 2018. This will be the most significant change in the editing interface in years and has been a big topic of discussion and criticism within the WordPress community.
The Gutenberg editor features a markedly different interface than the text-centric experience that WordPress users are accustomed to. (Click to expand.)
The Gutenberg editor incorporates columns, multi-media options and other ways to vary the layout of a page or post. (Click to expand.)
“We are now targeting Thursday, December 6th for public release and announcement. 5.0.1 will open for commits soon, and will be an area people can choose to focus on at the contributor day at WordCamp U.S. in Nashville this Sunday,” wrote Mullenweg on the WordPress developer blog.
According to Kinsta’s 2018 reports, WordPress owns a 60 percent market share for content management systems on websites with a known CMS. As the world’s leading CMS platform, any updates to the software impact a large majority website owners.
But if you read through the comments on Mullenweg’s post, the overall consensus is that many website owners and managers are not thrilled with this release coming so soon, especially with the holidays now in full swing. The release originally had been set to be publicly available on November 27 before being pushed back to allow for additional testing.
Many responded that the new release date — set to coincide with the company’s WordCamp Conference — was problematic for those who will have to manage the update.
“Matt, I’ve been trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but this is entirely irresponsible. You’re giving a release date with 3 days notice and while a huge amount of us who run WordPress-based businesses are traveling to WCUS and will be out-of-office,” wrote one commenter on Mullenweg’s blog post.
Mullenberg says the release is based on, “…the stability, testing, and reports on the release candidates” and if any new issues happen that show the software is not stable, the target release date will be adjusted. He also confirmed website owners do not have to update their platforms right away.
“You can push the button whenever you’re ready,” wrote Mullenweg. The WordPress development team has used recent smaller updates to ready the community for 5.0, introducing the new editor within the WordPress dashboard and allowing users to download a plugin to try it out.
(Click to expand the image)
Responsible WordPress users will likely want to update sooner rather than later, however, so that they can keep up with security patches as well as with themes and plug-in functionality tailored to the latest WordPress releases. That said, they can use the Classic Editor plug-in with 5.0 to mimic the current Editor, rather than switching to Gutenberg.
More on WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg
Anyone seeking to update to 5.0 but not ready for the Gutenberg block editor can install WordPress’ Classic Editor plugin to have an “indistinguishable” experience from version 4.9.8 for posting and editing.
The Classic Editor plugin will be supported until 2022, and users will be able to switch between the plugin and the newly updated Gutenberg version on a per-user or per-post level.
WordPress reports more than 1.3 million .org sites have already updated their platform to the Gutenberg version or downloaded the Classic Editor plugin.
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