WP Tavern

Gutenberg is Slowly Rolling Out to WordPress.com Users

Jeff Chandler · · 12 Comments

As part of the roadmap unveiled at WordCamp EU earlier this year, WordPress.com has started rolling out Gutenberg to a subset of users.

Try Gutenberg Call-out on WordPress.com

According to a WordPress.com Happiness Engineer, the team is testing the implementation to determine the best way and time to enable it. Users will not be able to use Gutenberg unless their theme is updated to support blocks and the various alignment options.

Theme Wranglers are already in the process of adding support to WordPress.com’s nearly 100 free themes.

A quick search of the WordPress.com support forums for Gutenberg provides some insight into what users think about the new editor. For example, this user provided feedback on the use of so many icons without displaying their textual equivalent.

For now, Gutenberg is opt-in but eventually will be opt-out. Once Gutenberg is made available to a wider audience, support documents and official blog posts will be published to inform users about the new editor.

12 Comments

  1. Vinny O'Hare

    So this tells me I need to update to a non guttenberg updated theme so I don’t ever have to switch. :)

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  2. Tomas M.

    Perhaps it would be a good idea to add additional Theme Tag to WP.org, so devs. can easily report when their theme is ready.

    This idea (enabling GB prompt only when theme is ready) can be adapted to self hosted users and to lower the probability of disaster stories.

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  3. Dave Bell

    Too many meaningless icons! When will they EVER learn?

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  4. Cameron

    WordPress: The next Skype?

    Skype has been all over the news earlier this month for retrograding its latest version.

    Based on this random selected article from BBC I cloned their next year’s article about WP so that they won’t need to do much research:

    WordPress U-turns on Squarespace-like features after complaints
    3 September 2019

    Automattic has announced it will remove a number of Squarespace-style features from its WordPress software.

    The software giant updated WordPress in version 5 with a new editor called Gutenberg but faced criticism from users who said it was “stupid” and the “worst ever update”.

    Automattic said it accepted that the new features “got in the way” of the software’s core uses: creating websites the easy way.

    Many of the updates simply “didn’t resonate” with most users, it said.

    It will revert back to old Classic Editor in upcoming version 6 of the software.

    When it announced version 5 major update, Automattic told the BBC: “We know this was a big change and we welcome feedback along the way.

    “We’re confident that as we continue to listen to users and provide updates to the app… we’ll be able to keep improving the experience.”

    And now, WordPress design director John Doe has written in a blog: “This past year we explored some design changes and heard from customers that we overcomplicated some of our core scenarios.”

    WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog. The software is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license.

    But now, Wix, Medium and Squarespace all provide similar features, with many copying ideas from one another.

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  5. Jon Brown

    I’m eagerly awaiting into feedback from those WP.com users.

    While they skew heavily towards “blogging” and don’t represent the full spectrum of CMS use we see on .org, they are the quintessential lay author/editor use case this whole thing is supposed to be targeting.

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    • Marcus Tibesar

      Not sure why you’re waiting for bloggers comments Jon. Just use it as it works well. We’ve been using in on a live 9seeds for months now.

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    • Neil Murray

      Your use of “whole thing” is not really valid IMO – the current Gutenberg editor is just stage 1 of a longer term comprehensive move to a React JavaScript based UI for the WP Admin.

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  6. David Thrift

    What I want to know, as a wordpress.com user is how is this new editor going to effect posts/pages during editing that were created before Gutenburg is shoved in our face? Are we going to have to re-write or reformat these blog posts and pages to fit this new “block” junk to make it work?

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    • Chris Diehl

      The Gutenberg editor does a fairly good job converting existing content into their corresponding blocks. Any content that doesn’t fit nicely into a block simply falls into the Classic Editor block, at which point you can reformat it at your leisure.

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  7. Marcus Tibesar

    We are fully live with Gutenberg now! Currently we are implementing Yoast’s new structured data blocks which makes Google web crawlers happy.

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  8. Zendo Deb

    How can I opt out now, and have done with it?

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  9. Chris Diehl

    The Gutenberg editor does a fairly good job converting existing content into their corresponding blocks. Any content that doesn’t fit nicely into a block simply falls into the Classic Editor block, at which point you can reformat it at your leisure.

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