What’s New In WordPress 5.0?

WordPress 5.0 introduces a radical new redesign of the WordPress editor based on React, a modern, flexible and responsive Javascript framework. This new block-based editor, code-named Gutenberg, promises to make the process of creating content even easier and more streamlined. But don’t click that update button just yet. Because this is such a massive change, not all plugins and themes may be compatible and you could end up breaking your website. Feedback on the new editor has not all been positive either with many people expressing anger at the changes with some feeling that it’s not quite ready for general use.

First of all, if you don’t want to use this new editor or you have a team that is only trained to use the current familiar interface, rest assured you can turn this off and go back to using the classic editor by installing the official classic editor plugin as over 700,000+ people have done. It is strongly recommended that you test the upgrade first on a staging or development version of your website to check for any issues that may arise after the upgrade or make a backup of your existing site before you do so.

There are already a ton of content blocks being developed to work with the new editor and many of the major plugins have already been updated to work with the new system. One great change is that widgets also now work as blocks so you can easily add shortcodes, recent posts, comments and other powerful widgets directly into your page or post content. If you come across a plugin or theme that isn’t compatible, you best bet may be to reach out to the developer and see if they would be willing to work on compatibility.

Embedding content has also now become much easier with support for YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and other social media able to be embedded as a block, with adjustable settings. It’s easy also to create and reuse block content that you’ve previously created in the past by saving block content as reusable blocks. WordPress 5.0 also adds support for PHP 7.3 which gives a tremendous performance boost and is supported until 2022. The new 2019 theme also comes bundled to show off the new block-based capabilities.

If you prefer to ease gradually into Gutenberg instead, check out the official Gutenberg Ramp plugin. This plugin allows you to enable the new editor selectively instead of all at once while allowing you to still make use of the classic editor for other posts. This way you can learn the new editor as you go along instead of all at once.

Now that WordPress 5.0 is finally here, there’s no turning back. Are you excited about the new version and looking forward to the adventure or has WordPress alienated it’s core base of users?

Take a test drive for yourself. Download the new WordPress 5.0 version here.