Gutenberg

If you reside in the web design world (especially the WordPress World), then you have probably heard about Gutenberg, the new page editor for WordPress.  It is scheduled to be release with 5.0 WordPress Core Update.

“For those who have not yet heard, Gutenberg is the new Editor for the WordPress Admin interface. This is big news because while many things about WordPress have changed since its birth, the editor has remained a fairly basic visual and HTML user experience. As a result, plugin and theme developers created add-ons and new functionality for the editor to fill their needs. This caused developers and many websites to become heavily dependent on shortcodes. WordPress is creating a more unified experience between what users create in the backend, and what displays on the front end. In this way, they are baking in some of the functionality so many users find “essential,” and particularly the functionality non-technical users need.

The other rift that grew deeper with time was that what an editor sees on the back-end did not necessarily represent what displayed on the front-end. As plugins and themes began integrating page builders and drag-and-drop components for ease of use, WordPress remained a plain text editor by default. Gutenberg solves for this disconnect as well. Not only does it make the editing experience more natural and fun, it also more accurately represents what will show on the front-end–a true “what you see is what you get” experience. It divides text, images, media, and more into building “blocks” which make up your pages.”

According to Janna Hilferty, Torque

What does Gutenberg mean to my business?

I have two types of clients.  Ones who I have created their vision and support/manage their vision.  Gutenberg will have little to no effect on these clients.  These clients’ sites are back up via cloud.  They are on premium web hosting platforms.  Virtual assistants have been assigned to each, and we have been doing some testing on each of these sites. Some plugins are conflicting with Gutenberg, however, we have hired a few developers to look at some work around.  While I would not say that we are 100% confident about the release of 5.0…we have plan b in place just in case.

My other client, are the ones, which we designed their vision and they decided to not have us support/manage their web sites. Recently, an email was sent about Gutenberg. A link, with a little more information was provided, and we offered to back up sites.  This is going to be a complimentary services, for the next 30 days.  Because we do not know the hosting platform selected, we did not offer staging and/or testing of Gutenberg on their site.  No one has take us up on our offer.  Hopefully, they have a plan b set up.

If you are looking for a web designer and/or brand developer, then I am available. I can be reached at info@jdswebdesign.biz or 678-718-5489.

Image courtesy of Nathan Dumlao.