Matt Cromwell Hosts Matt Mullenweg in Q&A Gutenberg Interview

Matt Cromwell, Head of Support and Community Outreach for GiveWP and an administrator for the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, hosted a question and answer session about Gutenberg with Matt Mullenweg earlier today. The interview concludes the Advanced WordPress Gutenberg interview series that includes, Joost de Valk, Ahmad Awais, and Tammie Lister.

Mullenweg began the session by explaining why there is a concerted effort to improve the editor. “It’s really almost any user test that you watch,” he said. “Both watching people brand new to WordPress and those with years of experience on how they used the editor. It became obvious that we could make something more accessible to new users, but also, a lot more powerful for developers.”

With regards to a release date, Mullenweg confirmed that Gutenberg will ship when it’s ready. Later in the interview, Mullenweg was asked if he could provide a more concrete answer.

“For those who want a concrete date, we will have one or two orders of magnitude more users of Gutenberg in April,” he responded. “That doesn’t mean necessarily a 5.0 release, but it does mean that if you’re planning on aiming for something where a lot of users will be interacting with Gutenberg, aim for April.”

While the project’s name is Gutenberg, some developers have expressed concerns on how the name will be deprecated if at all once it’s merged into core. There are a number of educational resources, products, and tool kits referencing Gutenberg that could be a source of confusion once it’s merged into core and referred to as the editor.

Mullenweg was asked if the Gutenberg name will be deprecated. “We’ll see,” he replied. “I don’t think it’s the most important thing to figure out right now. We’re tackling some much bigger issues. If the plugin is useful, we’ll keep it around for beta testing, if not, we’ll have it turn itself off.”

Mullenweg concluded the interview thanking the Advanced WordPress Facebook group for the passion and discussions shared by members. The group has more than 30K members, is free to join, well maintained, and often filled with interesting topics. You can watch the interview in its entirety below.