Are you ready for Gutenburg?
Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, announced that WordPress 5.0 will in fact be released on Thursday, December 6th, 2018. In saying the WordPress community’s response was not entirely positive would be an understatement.
The new version of the WordPress platform (5.0) features the highly-divisive Gutenberg editor. It’s now scheduled to be released the day before the company’s WordCamp Conference begins.
“We are now targeting Thursday, December 6th for public release and announcement. 5.0.1 will open for commits soon, and will be an area people can choose to focus on at the contributor day at WordCamp U.S. in Nashville this Sunday,” Mullenweg said on the WordPress developer blog.
Some responded that the new release date was problematic for those who will now have to manage the update. Mullenberg said the release is based on, “the stability, testing, and reports on the release candidates” and if any new issues happen that show the software is not stable, the target release date will be adjusted. He also confirmed website owners do not have to update their platforms right away if they don’t want to.
“You can push the button whenever you’re ready,” wrote Mullenweg. The WordPress dev team has used recent smaller updates to ready the community for 5.0, introducing the new editor within the WordPress dashboard and allowing users to download a plugin to try it out. WordPress users will most likely want to update sooner rather than later so that they can keep up with security patches as well as themes and plug-ins. Optionally, they can use the Classic Editor plug-in with 5.0 to stay with the current Editor, rather than switching to Gutenberg.
So, will you be upgrading to WordPress 5.0 Gutengurg?