On Thursday 6th December WordPress launched it’s much anticipated WordPress 5.0 version incorporating the new “Gutenberg” editor. The entire editing experience has been rebuilt for media rich pages and posts.
New Editing Experience
This is an exciting development because non-technical users will be able to be more creative with content on websites.
Content within a page will be, going forward, arranged and controlled using ‘blocks’. Blocks are a great new tool for building engaging content where you can insert, rearrange, and style multimedia content with very little technical knowledge. Instead of using custom code, you can add a block and focus on your content.
You can find out more detail on the new editor here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
Upgrading your website to WordPress 5
This completely new editing system has a number of technical implications both in the back-end editor and the front end public facing website. As such we have to look at each website on a case-by-case basis to assess the impact, make changes in a development environment and then implement on your live website.
Industry-wide opinion is that website owners should wait until early January, after the inevitable minor updates and subsequent plugin upgrades have come through, work together and are stable. We concur with this view and will be implementing a planned approach to assessing, making changes and upgrading your WordPress installations.
Please do not attempt a self-upgrade – this will undoubtedly lead to page content issues, and be costly to fix.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on the many websites we look after under maintenance contracts, but if you do spot anything wrong with your public facing website, please get in touch.
