A New Way to WordPress: 4 Things to Know About Gutenberg

WordPress is the internet’s most widely used content man­age­ment system, used by everyone from The New York Times and Best Buy to countless in­di­vidu­als who blog for fun. Although there are many different ways to create a suc­cess­ful site with WordPress, the platform sometimes gets knocked for not being easy enough for beginners.

With the emergence and pop­ular­ity of drag-and-drop site builders, including IONOS MyWebsite, WordPress has needed to find a new, in­nov­at­ive way to edit and publish web content. For the last few years, first-time site owners have opted for movable content blocks instead of the sometimes confusing systems WordPress has in place. In fact, experts from sites like HostingAd­vice.com recommend the IONOS MyWebsite builder to beginners looking to get started online.

With the advent of a new visual-based editor, however, WordPress is poised to close the com­pet­it­ive gap. Both pro­fes­sion­als and amateurs will want to learn how to get the most out of WordPress 5.0, due out sometime this year.

The editor, called Gutenberg, is inspired by the re­volu­tion­ary inventor who changed the world when he built the first printing press. Naming the project after the man arguably re­spons­ible for the explosion of Europe’s Renais­sance shows the extent of the WordPress team’s ambition — it expects Gutenberg to have a massive impact.

Users who have no in-depth un­der­stand­ing of code or web design will be able to use Gutenberg’s draggable blocks to create a wide variety of content and edit everything from wordy blog posts to embedded videos. It’s a faster and simpler tool that will make it easier than ever to build WordPress websites.

Users who work with the current pre-Gutenberg editor have to use a variety of different ap­proaches to edit different types of content. For example, the current platform uses a media library for images, pasted links for embedded videos, short­codes for plugins’ spe­cial­ised assets and widgets for the content displayed on the side of a page.

With Gutenberg, however, users won’t have to master new tools each time they want to perform a different task — the new editor will stream­line all of these tasks into a single intuitive tool. Keep reading to learn more about the world-changing update about to hit the WordPress realm.

Although Gutenberg won’t of­fi­cially launch until WordPress 5.0 is released, you can install the new editor today. Soon, Gutenberg will be the primary way to build and edit your WordPress website; instead of putting it off and learning how Gutenberg works only when you ab­so­lutely need to, try it now and slowly get a feel for the new editor.

If you currently use WordPress 4.8, you can download Gutenberg from the WordPress plugin re­pos­it­ory. Once installed, your classic WordPress editor won’t be replaced — but you can work with Gutenberg by finding it in the Posts section of your dashboard nav­ig­a­tion menu. Unlock the new user ex­per­i­ence and see what’s in store!

When WordPress was first launched in 2003, the internet was a simpler place. De­velopers, eCommerce en­tre­pren­eurs, and hobbyists didn’t have the same needs as they do now, and the original WordPress platform worked as a simple blogging tool. Today, users are much more likely to add videos, buttons, and a variety of advanced features to their websites.

Although WordPress has adapted  by making those features available to its users, the interface has become more com­plic­ated to un­der­stand and use as new com­pon­ents are tacked on. Gutenberg solves these problems. Even if you’re building your very first website and have no knowledge of code, the platform’s movable blocks make it easy to create the site of your dreams.

Blocks provide a unified way in which to style content and this removes the need for short­codes, custom post types and theme options. Users can embed content from YouTube, Sound­Cloud, Reddit, and many other websites using the block tool, which also enables site owners to control column-based layouts.

More advanced de­velopers will still be able to write code and easily preview it in blocks. This is just a small per­cent­age of the features that make Gutenberg intuitive for amateurs and a power­fully efficient tool for pro­fes­sion­als.

Even though beginners are flocking to WYSIWYG site builders, Gutenberg might reverse that trend and bring scribes back to WordPress. The new visual editor includes much more white space than the current version of WordPress, one of the most im­me­di­ately apparent ways that the redesign is all about usable, simple content creation.

Creators will no longer be dis­trac­ted by a million tools and will be able to focus on the task at hand. The features Gutenberg offers are es­pe­cially valuable for websites with a big focus on writing.

The pared-down editing ex­per­i­ence actually in­tro­duces a lot of tools that many writers were missing before. Users can make ad­just­ments or insert tables with intuitive, code-free controls, similar to those they might have seen in site builders or blogging platforms like Medium.

Gutenberg also in­tro­duces a table of contents writers and readers can use to jump ahead to any section in their article. Writers can add anchors that enable them to link to par­tic­u­lar para­graphs or sections of their stories, funneling the audience to the exact point the writers want readers to find.

In previous versions of WordPress, a post’s word count was displayed at the very bottom of the editor. Now, Gutenberg displays the number as a popup for quick and easy viewing. Anyone who wants to build a writing-focused website will find a lot of useful tools in Gutenberg.

Gutenberg marks a big change for WordPress. Tra­di­tion­ally, the content man­age­ment system is known for its com­mit­ment to backward com­pat­ib­il­ity, meaning older systems and plugins can continue to operate within newer versions of WordPress.

Some de­velopers, however, have argued that the focus on in­ter­op­er­ab­il­ity means that a lot of the WordPress codebase is out of sync with con­tem­por­ary coding standards. Although the release of WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg will bring about massive updates to the code, com­pat­ib­il­ity will be a major concern for site owners that haven’t revamped their sites for years.

A vast pool of plugins and themes will likely ex­per­i­ence com­pat­ib­il­ity problems with Gutenberg, as the new editor phases out the TinyMCE in­teg­ra­tion behind the editing interface’s toolbar. To stay up to date or even ahead of the WordPress evolution, many or­gan­isa­tions will need to spend countless hours migrating to Gutenberg’s content blocks.

For some de­vel­op­ment agencies and con­tract­ors, this might be a bonus. They’ll be able to find a lot of work when eCommerce busi­nesses suddenly realise the need to update their sites. But, some people will find that their favorite sites no longer function as ef­fi­ciently as they used to, and many companies will probably decide to cut their losses and let sites die.

On a large scale, none of this is entirely new. Tech­no­logy’s fast evolution creates constant change. Gutenberg may be the latest example of this constant churn, although older and less main­tained sites are likely to break, more en­tre­pren­eurs, de­velopers, and creators will have access to an in­creas­ingly powerful tool to build the websites of the future.