WordPress 5.0 Is Here. Tell Me More

Edit: This post was written back in 2018. For more up-to-date information on WordPress Core and its current version, you can view our newer posts. You can also visit WordPress’s own news page.

In the WordPress community it has been a long time coming. It has been on the tips of our tongues at every WordCamp or meet up. But today the day is finally here – WordPress 5.0 has landed.

For everyone else, this may not actually get you that excited. But if you’re a lover of using WordPress, then you will want to see what the future of the content editing experience has to offer.

There has been lots of chatter about whether WordPress has rushed the launch of the new editing experience. However, when is anything really ready?! One of our core beliefs is ‘Get it up, get it going’. Or as Rob Moore has more recently put it in his book ‘Start Now, Get Perfect Later’.

The web is constantly evolving, and by focusing on an ‘everything has to be perfect’ mentality, we’ll all be left behind very quickly. The team at WordPress know this and has done an amazing job of shipping the new release. Just in time for Christmas 🙂 Ho Ho Ho.

With thanks to over 420 people who have actively contributed to this release. It simply shows the power and size of the WordPress community and the amount of effort that has gone into this release.

So now that we’ve praised their hard work, let’s see what they’ve been working so hard on.

What’s New?

The new experience allows users to add full width imagery, cover photos and text over images. Add colour overlays to photos, columns to a page, videos, and buttons all from the new editor.

For content editors and bloggers this is a dream. You can quickly create a page with little effort, no longer bound by the restrictions of an existing page template.

Just because you can customise the layout on the page, doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build the full website yourself. You might, but the introduction of the new editor is not going to rid the world of website designers. But when new websites are built using 5.0, editing and adding new pages will be far easier. It’ll provide many more possibilities for layouts on pages like blog posts.

Users will be able to publish an even quicker follow up to an event, with a video or even a gallery showcasing the event. As the new builder gains popularity who knows what new add-ons will become available.

For security and performance we always advise our customers to update to the latest version, once their website’s plugins or theme provide a compatible update.

So don’t go guns blazing, just yet. Most websites where they haven’t had a block based editing experience, may use a third party plugin in its place. Updating to the latest version of WordPress may cause some compatibility issues. So for the time being you can search for a plugin called the Classic Editor. It is a Free plugin built by the WordPress community. By installing the plugin, when updating to WordPress 5.0, this will override the new editor for the time being.

This approach is ideal for anyone unsure on whether the new editor will cause any issues with their current website or plugins. The classic editor is being supported until 2021, so you will have plenty of time to test the water.

We are installing the classic editor on the websites we support, so we can slowly introduce clients to the new experience. Also avoiding any issues until we are certain client’s sites won’t be affected.

If you are interested in testing the new experience for yourself, you can take a test drive using the Gutenberg builder here.

Alternatively any new website that we build from 2019, we’ll be looking to adopt the new WordPress 5.0 editing experience. So we are firmly looking forward to see what we can do with the new tools available.