What is Gutenberg?

Gutenberg is the new editing environment in WordPress. It’s the new way of creating your posts or articles while using WordPress. We are counting days before it’s upcoming installation into the platform. Take a deep breath and give yourself and your team the time to get used the new experience of editing.

My personal opinion is that changes are a good thing. Of course, we all gonna need some practice and a bit of effort to work around it. But everything is doable! WordPress Gutenberg is about to arrive and we are welcoming the new editing experience.

WordPress

It is not a secret that I belong to the WordPress Tribe since their opening day. I use and work and earn my living through the WordPress. I have dive into frontend and backend and deep code and whatever you can think of – regarding WordPress – done it, tried it, use it, taste it, hate it and love it.  No matter how much I have tried to work with Joomla, Drupal, MODX, Magento etc I keep returning to my first love: WordPress.

Gutenberg

WordPress.org official presentation declares:  “We call the new editor Gutenberg. The entire editing experience has been rebuilt for media-rich pages and posts. Experience the flexibility that blocks will bring, whether you are building your first site, or write code for a living.” 

You can give it a test drive at this spectacular demo looking environment: Gutenberg

Blocks and Blogging

If you have never before seen this type of editing, there is nothing to be afraid of… It is very friendly and easy to use editing behavior. Blocks are a great new tool for building engaging content.

Be your own builder

With blocks, 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. Without being an expert developer, you can build your own custom posts and pages. Here’s a selection of the default blocks included with Gutenberg:

Gutenberg Developers

Gutenberg is built with modern technology. It was developed on GitHub using the WordPress REST API, JavaScript, and React. Read more…

Ready to Fly

WordPress recommends migrating features to blocks, but support for existing WordPress functionality remains. There will be transition paths for shortcodes, meta-boxes, and Custom Post Types. Read more…

Discover the flexibility to use media and content, side by side, driven by your vision.

When will Gutenberg be merged into WordPress?

Gutenberg will be sufficiently polished, tested, iterated, and proven enough to be merged into WordPress 5.0, with an estimated release date of 2018.

The editor focus started in early 2017 with the first three months spent designing, planning, prototyping, and testing prototypes, to help us inform how to approach this project. The actual plugin, which we can install from the repository, was launched during WordCamp Europe in June.

There is still plenty of work to do, but WordPress Developers are moving fast. New updates tend to be released on a weekly basis. Let’s all help in this process by giving feedback, surfacing issues, testing, or even contributing so it can be ready in time for WordPress 5.0. (Source: WordPress)

What are “blocks” and why are we using them?

The current WordPress editor is an open text window—it’s always been a wonderful blank canvas for writing, but when it comes to building posts and pages with images, multimedia, embedded content from social media, polls, and other elements, it required a mix of different approaches that were not always intuitive:

• Media library/HTML for images, multimedia, and approved files.
• Posted links for embeds.
• Shortcodes for specialized assets from plugins.
• Featured images for the image at the top of a post or page.
• Excerpts for subheadings.
• Widgets for content on the side of a page.

As we thought about these uses and how to make them obvious and consistent, WordPress began to embrace the concept of “blocks.” All of the above items could be blocks: easy to search and understand, and easy to dynamically shift around the page. The block concept is very powerful, and if designed thoughtfully, can offer an outstanding editing and publishing experience. (Source: WordPress)

You can give it a test drive at this spectacular demo looking environment: Gutenberg

What browsers will Gutenberg support?

Gutenberg will work in modern browsers, and Internet Explorer 11.

The list of supported browsers can be found in the Make WordPress handbook. By “modern browsers” it is generally meant the current and past two versions of each major browsers. (Source: WordPress)

WordPress is already the world’s most popular publishing platform. Why change the editor at all?

As an open-source project, WordPress believes that it is critical to continue to innovate and keep working to make the core experience intuitive and enjoyable for all users. As a community project, Gutenberg has the potential to do just that, and the WordPress Team is excited to pursue this goal together. If you’d like to test, contribute, or offer feedback, they welcome it here.

Visit WordPress Gutenberg FAQ page for more information