What is Gutenberg?

One thing is for sure, Gutenberg will be launched with WordPress 5.0 update. WordPress must innovate to survive. Matt Mullenweg and the entire team have looked at the past and the future and decided that a better, faster, easier user interface and experience, are the disruptive innovations that WordPress needs to improve and survive. WordPress hopes to attract users from Wix or Squarespace to beat the competition and increase its market share after it’s launch.

What is Gutenberg

Gutenberg is the code name for the new WordPress text editor that is going to change content editing fundamentals in WordPress. WordPress 5.0 will have Gutenberg by default.  As per WordPress “Gutenberg” is the name of the project to create a new editor experience for WordPress. The goal is to create a new post and page editing experience that makes it easy for anyone to create rich post layouts. This was the kickoff goal: The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortlessly and has “blocks” to make it easy which today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

How to Install & Test Gutenberg 

Here’s how to install the plugin: Go to Plugins → Add New

• Search for “Gutenberg”
• Click Install Now
• Wait for the Install Now button to change to Activate
• Click Activate

How Gutenberg Will Change Content Creation in WordPress

Each piece of content in Gutenberg will be a block, which can be edited and customized individually. Content creation in it will be similar to building blocks using legos and a lot more visually similar to using a page builder such as beaver builder. 

Each type of content will be a separate block such as regular text, images, videos, tables, buttons, etc. Each block is self-contained and if you make changes to one block, it won’t affect the other blocks. Having said this, it is not a replacement for page builder entirely at this stage. 

What You Need to Do to be Ready for Gutenberg

Gutenberg is the biggest WordPress update in a decade. It might break a few things on your site when you update WordPress 5.0. It is available as a stand-alone plugin currently and you can follow these 5 steps to be ready for the upcoming release, which will replace the classic post editor.  You can also review the important plugins your website relies on to function fully and see how are those plugins for keeping up with the upcoming Gutenberg change. For example, Gut guys at Yoast SEO plugin think that it is WordPress’s first step into the bright future ahead. They are also predicting that Gutenberg is the start of something big for WordPress. People at Gravity forms, the most advanced form builder, are also working hard for the Gutenberg integration and have launched the Gravity Forms Gutenberg v1.0 Beta 1 add-on to work with it. A live preview of your form will appear as you make changes to the block settings.

Conclusion

As per Chris Lema, If it were me, I’d stop talking about Gutenberg as a change to the editor and start talking about it as a change to the architecture.

I could not agree more with Chris that change to the editor is just the start and we should be ready for the steady stream of changes to the WordPress architecture in the coming days. 

What is your opinion about Gutenberg? Are you excited or worried about this change in the WordPress text editor?