As website developers and designers, we also endeavor to keep you aware of any changes in policies, upgrades, or website design requirements. One such change is the release of the Gutenberg plugin by WordPress.
Gutenberg is being released on July 31, 2018 with a beta version being released as early as July 17. It is named for Johannes Gutenberg- the inventor of the printing press- and is part of WordPress’ plan to make the default editor in WP version 5.0. Gutenberg was created with a goal of making it easier to utilize short codes and HTML.
The Gutenberg plugin, though promising to be an improvement and easy to use, has so far been found to leave many website developers less than impressed as a number of website owners who have installed the update and experienced a variety of problems with their website. This is not to say that the upgrade is not going to beneficial at some future date, but only that we recommend that it should not be installed at this time. Some current issues with Gutenberg include:
- It does not have Markdown support
- It can be quite difficult to learn, despite many claims of it being easy.
- There is limited support of meta boxes, which can break custom themes
- Gutenberg does not support responsive columns
- It is not as compatible as web developers would like in regards to working with other WP plugins and themes. As a result, in scenarios where website owners have already added Gutenberg to their site, web developers are finding themselves inundated with repair requests.
- A number of people who have installed Gutenberg have found it a bit cumbersome to use – especially if one uses the Screen Reader.
Although Gutenberg is not yet a part of WordPress you can install it as a plugin and in upcoming releases WordPress may prompt you to “Try Gutenberg.” At this time, we do not recommend that you install it without checking with our support team first. Since many of our client’s sites use custom themes, there could be issues with integration with the Gutenberg editor. We will likely be proactively installing the “Classic Editor” plugin on many sites to keep Gutenberg from breaking certain sites when it is installed automatically in WordPress 5.0.
Our goal will always be to provide our web clients with the information needed to help your business and website thriving and currently, Gutenberg is not recommended. We will be monitoring the developments of Gutenberg and will let you know when/if the plugin has been tweaked to make it safe to implement. If you have any questions regarding the Gutenberg, or any other website related issues or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact the Page Progressive support team.