Gutenberg is coming to a WordPress site near you soon. How soon? The goal is to ship in April 2018! That means you need to start getting ready now.

Guten-What?

First off if you don’t know that Gutenberg is, check it out. It’ll be the new text editor for WordPress replacing the current visual editor.

If needed, Matt can ramp you up with a little Gutenberg history.

Getting Started

To get started with Gutenberg, you can install the Gutenberg plugin on a development site today and start testing. I wouldn’t put it on a production site yet, but you’re going to do what you’re going to do. 🙂

Submit Feedback

Find a bug? Log it. Usability issue? Log it. Design enhancement, new feature, bad feelings? Let them know. The team really does want your input. From developers to people who just write blog posts, they want everyone’s feedback.

Start Writing Blocks, GutenBlocks, in Javascript

GutenBlocks are the new thing. If you’re a developer start learning how to create them. Oh, and they’re in JavaScript too. If you only know PHP it’s time to learn something new.

https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/handbook/blocks/

GutenBlocks will replace widgets and shortcodes in WordPress so we all have to start learning how they work.

Eventually, all of WordPress could be Gutenberg with GutenBlocks making up the header, footer, and sidebars too.

Classic Editor

WordPress knows that not everyone will be ready for Gutenberg though and so they released the Classic Editor. When installed and activated it’ll prevent Gutenberg from loading.

There are also hooks to disable Gutenberg from plugins and themes as well.

This should be considered a temporary fix though as we need to be moving towards Gutenberg.

Change is Good

Don’t be afraid of Gutenberg. The vision pretty awesome and it already has a lot of cool features. Plus they’re making it better every day. However, there will be this weird transition phase that we’ll all need to work through together.

Will Gutenberg work with your theme? Will it work with your plugins? Hopefully, but we won’t know until Gutenberg gets closer to a 1.0 release.