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Welcoming WordPress 5.0 And The New Editor

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The major new version of WordPress scheduled for release today is a big deal, both anticipated and feared by those who rely on the world's most popular web publishing platform.

WordPress is used by everyone from solo bloggers and small businesses to major publishers (including Forbes) and marketing organizations. Thomas Griffin has written here about How To Use WordPress As A SaaS Platform, the foundation of your own cloud software business. WordPress has a corporate backer, a private company called Automattic, but also benefits from open source code contributions from developers around the world.

Part of what makes WordPress popular is that its open source foundation means you can get started with it "for free" and, equally important, you can extend or tweak its functionality to make it serve your needs. Editing the core software code is not a good idea because then it becomes challenging to preserve those changes if you ever upgrade, but most of the core functionality can be modified with plugins and themes, software modules that hook into a fairly well documented set of function calls. That is what makes WordPress a software platform, not merely a software product.

Speaking as someone who once foolishly tried to write his own blogging software, I can tell you the advantage of starting with an established platform is you can let other, smarter people do all the hard parts, then add your own flourish. My RSVPMaker plugin, for example, allows you to use the standard blog editing tools for event content, with calendar and event registration added.

The drawback of relying on a platform is that when the platform changes, any customizations or extensions must keep up, or they may break. The flagship feature of WordPress 5.0 is a new editor, known as Gutenberg, which threatens to break some things.

The new WordPress editor, showing controls specific to an embedded YouTube video.

Screenshot: David Carr

The goals of Gutenberg are worthwhile, like de-cluttering the editing experience and allowing you to do more elaborate content formatting with the visual  editor, without needing to resort to HTML code. Gutenberg is referred to as a "block editor." Instead of one editor, with a row of buttons across the top, you get editing controls for each block of content that are specific to the type of content you are working with -- an ordinary paragraph, a bullet list, an image, an embedded video, or a placeholder for some dynamic content to be executed on the server like a lookup of current stock prices.

What the new editor is most likely to break are the plugins and bespoke customizations that tied into specific features of the old editor. For example, I'm typing this into a WordPress editor screen that features an Add Chart button Forbes has provided to allow me to easily insert a stock chart into this page, if I was writing about the stock of a public company. If Forbes decides to adopt the new editor, they will have to replicate that function under a new programming model. Major publishers who have layered significant custom editing and publishing workflow features on top of WordPress will have to think carefully about the tradeoffs and will probably take their time before making a move.

I was amused to read a column in Diginomica, Is WordPress becoming the SAP of CMS’s?, comparing Gutenberg to SAP's S/4HANA -- a major overhaul of the SAP software many companies depend on for core operational and financial functions. Technology analyst Den Howlett notes that many companies have made customizations of the generic functions in SAP's software to meet the specific needs of their business. S/4HANA introduces a high performance database and other architectural changes that may prove beneficial in the long run, but it's different enough that many longtime SAP customers are hesitating to upgrade.

Gutenberg is not that radical of a change. For one thing, the WordPress developers make a big commitment to backward compatibility. Even as they encourage site owners to upgrade to 5.0, they will continue to release security patches for older versions. And while Gutenberg becomes the standard browser with WordPress 5.0, it's possible to install a Classic Editor plugin that restores the familiar editing experience.

Still, this is not going to be a New Coke / Classic Coke scenario where we're going to go back to the old way of doing things.

The point of the new editor is to keep WordPress competitive with other web publishing tools that have emerged in recent years, such as Medium. Automattic operates WordPress.com, which like Medium is a site where you can sign up to host a blog for free, with enticements to upgrade for premium features. Medium and many other blog article editors, like the one built into LinkedIn, use a block style editor.

I used Medium extensively when I was editing a tech company blog that was hosted there, and I see the attraction -- but I like Gutenberg better. The old WordPress editor did a pretty good job of allowing you to do most things in visual mode, while still allowing you to add custom HTML when needed. The Gutenberg editor improves on that. For example, I can now add a simple table using Gutenberg controls. The visual table editor doesn't do as much as I might like with allowing me to set column widths, but if necessary I can toggle from visual mode to HTML editing -- not for the whole page but for that specific block -- and make my tweaks.

As a publisher or a developer, you can also create your own custom blocks for formats you use frequently for callouts or author bios or whatever.

To build its own block editor, the WordPress coders embraced React, a modern JavaScript framework originally developed by Facebook to enable more responsive and elaborate web user interfaces. Some of the grumbling you hear about Gutenberg comes from web developers who are having a hard time climbing the learning curve of becoming better JavaScript programmers. I sympathize, but the payoff is there.

What if you are not a programmer and haven't added any particularly fancy customizations to your site? Then I think you probably want to upgrade to WordPress 5.0, maybe not today but within a few months, after the first round of bug fixes have been released.

I recently consulted with Geeks on Tour, a small business I wrote about here years ago that runs a membership-based website. The owners were nervous about the impending release. I set up their theme and assortment of plugins on a test site running the WordPress 5.0 beta, and nothing important seemed to break. I have been running the Gutenberg plugin on some of my own production websites for several months, and I'll be upgrading as soon as the update goes live. The glitches I was seeing initially have melted away.

Although I see a lot of comments on Twitter about the release being "rushed," it was delayed several times -- I was originally hearing it would come out over the summer. I believe the core team of developers, from Automattic and elsewhere, have worked hard to get it right. I'm sure some bugs won't be apparent until after the mass-market deployment of new code, but they will be fixed, probably quickly.

I'll post an update here if anything goes wrong with my WordPress 5.0 sites, but I'm looking forward to the adventure.

Update Dec. 15, 2018: This morning I activated the Classic Editor plugin on the website of a small business client who was confused by the change and missed the Pixabay image search plugin she had come to rely on (which appears not to have been updated to work with Gutenberg). I continue to be a mostly happy Gutenberg user for my own websites, but I have seen some issues with copy-and-paste from Microsoft Word not working well (missing spaces between some words).

For a more critical take on Gutenberg, read Reviewing Gutenberg: Is WordPress’ New Editor Up to Scratch? (I remain more positive but see the author's points).

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