CentrioHost Blog

As of December 06, 2018, WordPress 5.0 “Bebo” is here! If you ignored all the other updates this year, now’s the time to buckle down and take notice as this is the biggest update for 2018. WordPress is completely revamping how users and developers use the CMS with their new Gutenberg editor. It’s now all about blocks. We also have a fresh Twenty Nineteen theme which is the default on new installations.

As with any new version of WordPress, we always recommend testing. This might sound like a broken record, but because this release impacts everything from the editor, to third-party plugins, and even your theme, testing is not optional! If you don’t test, things could easily break. This is one release where you don’t want to just click that update button.

That being said, let’s dive into everything that’s new with WordPress 5.0 release.

WordPress 5.0 Changes Everything (What’s New)

With WordPress 4.8 (Evans) we got a multitude of new widgets and improvements, along with a handy improvement to how links work in the visual editor.

With WordPress 4.9 (Tipton) we saw a significant step toward a more user-centric way to customize and manage websites, with great improvements to the Customizer, new exciting functionalities to widgets, a powerful text editor for editing code.

Most of the past updates have been relatively minor and for a lot of us, didn’t impact us that much. WordPress 5.0 is different. Rather than adding minor improvements here and there, this release is entirely focused on the following two things:

1. The new Gutenberg WordPress Editor
2. Twenty Nineteen WordPress theme

Other than that, minor changes and bug fixes are only being looked at on a case-by-case basis. In reality, it’s all about Gutenberg. ?

While at first, this might sound like there isn’t that much changing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth! Gutenberg is an attempt to push WordPress as a CMS forward in website building space. In fact, the WordPress team is planning on moving away from the old release cycle where we only get small updates to one where we’ll see bigger changes happening at once. However, they have also said the plan is to have a minor WordPress release twice a month now that WordPress 5.0 is released. You can check out what they have planned for Gutenberg Phase 2.

So what exactly is Gutenberg? The Gutenberg handbook does a great job at summarizing it:

Gutenberg began as a transformation of the WordPress editor — a new interface for adding, editing, and manipulating content. It seeks to make it easy for anyone to create rich, flexible content layouts with a block-based UI. All types of page components are represented as modular blocks, which means they can be accessed from a unified block menu, dropped anywhere on a page, and directly edited to create the custom presentation the user wants.

It is a fundamental modernization and transformation of how the WordPress experience works, creating new opportunities for both users and developers. Gutenberg introduces new frameworks, interaction patterns, functionality, and user experiences for WordPress…

In other words, in WordPress 5.0, you will no longer have the same classic WordPress editor or text editor that you’ve been used to using over the past decade. ? It’s now going to look like this:

In fact, you might have already seen a callout about it in your WordPress dashboard. This was added in the WordPress 4.9.8 minor release as a way to give users a heads up that this is really happening.

Gutenberg is the default and only editor on fresh WordPress 5.0 installations. Don’t worry, you can install the Classic Editor plugin if you want. This will allow you to continue using it alongside the new Gutenberg editor.

However, fair warning, the WordPress team has said that the Classic Editor plugin will only be officially supported until December 31, 2021. So we highly recommend diving into Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 sooner than later.

Why is this happening? There are a couple of reasons.

1. WordPress Has to Compete

The first is that even though the self-hosted version of WordPress is open source, Automattic, the team behind WordPress.com is still a business. It needs to competewith all of these other website building solutions such as Wix and Squarespace. If you take a look at the WordPress market share, from 2017 to 2018, year-on-year growth is at around 17.3%. While that seems great, take a look at some of the competitors. Squarespace grew by 180% and Wix grew by 233%.

And while the open source project and the business are technically separate, they go hand in hand with each other. In other words, WordPress needs to catch up! Why do you think all the fancy page builder plugins are growing at an unbelievable rate? It’s because people need easier ways to build their websites and write content. Even other publishing platforms such as Medium and Ghost frankly have a much better writing experience if you’re just wanting to blog.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, competition is what drives the product and community forward faster.

2. Needed a Rewrite

Second, Gutenberg is now built on React, a very popular JavaScript framework used and maintained by companies like Facebook and Instagram. Our developers at Host SEO love React, and in fact, we used it when we decided to roll our own affiliate system. Besides that Gutenberg takes advantage of a lot of other modern technologies such as the REST API, ESnext + JSX, WebPack, etc. Riad Benguella has a great post on how Gutenberg is changing WordPress development.

Because of how it is structured, it opens up a whole new world for developers in terms of “block development.” Remember, everything in Gutenberg is about blocks. So you’ll probably be hearing that term a lot.

But it can also complicate things as typically developers would need to learn new languages. However, thankfully, the WordPress community has come to rescue and there are great open source projects such as create-guten-block. Essentially this is a zero-configuration dev-toolkit (#0CJS) to develop WordPress Gutenberg blocks in a matter of minutes without configuring React, webpack, ES6/7/8/Next, ESLint, Babel, etc.

You’ll probably also want to check out the following:

• Atomic Blocks
• Stackable
• Kadence Blocks

You would think that with all of this, the aim would be to improve performance? While we hope this is the case, a lot of reports so far are indicating slower performance.

• Slow perceived performance compared to Classic Editor
• Benchmarking Gutenberg

Note: Some of these should be taken with a grain of salt as the Gutenberg team has been pushing out a lot of updates. And now that WordPress 5.0 is officially here, you can expect a lot more to come.

The other downside to this is that most (not all) WordPress theme and plugins have to be rewritten to work with Gutenberg. Mainly those that interact with the WordPress editor. Yoast SEO is a great example of a WordPress plugin developer that jumped on board really quick! They pushed out their first Gutenberg update back in July 2017, and have been releasing new ones ever since. Even though they were first worried about