WordPress 5.0 is marching forward with beta 1 released this evening. Major items that need testing include the Gutenberg editor, the new Twenty Nineteen default theme, and all previous default themes, which have been updated to be compatible with the new editor.
You’ll want to make sure you are using Gutenberg version 4.1 before updating your site to WordPress 5.0 beta 1. Gutenberg is now considered feature complete as of the 4.1 release. It is active on more than 580,000 installations.
WordPress 5.0 beta 1 has arrived five days after its expected release on October 19. Contributors expressed concern in today’s dev chat over the large number of issues on GitHub in milestones related to 5.0.
Gary Pendergast, who is responsible for leading the merge, said the dates for RC can be changed if necessary.
“We can shift RC if we need to, which won’t necessarily affect the final release date,” Pendergast said. “If we have to shift RC a long way, that would be a good time to have another look at the release date.”
The Gutenberg team has not published a merge proposal to date. In September, Pendergast said “the Gutenberg leads are ultimately responsible for the merge proposal” but the timeline was still to be determined. Unless a proposal is forthcoming, the project seems to have bypassed this stage, which has frequently been a requirement for new themes, APIs, and feature plugins in the past.
Volunteers contributing to the Gutenberg handbook met for the first time today in the #core-docs channel. Chris Van Patten is coordinating the documentation effort to clean up and prepare Gutenberg-related docs for 5.0 over the next five weeks.
Testers are advised to consult the list of known bugs before reporting to the Alpha/Beta forum or filing a bug on trac.
If this release stays on schedule, Gutenberg is now 26 days away from shipping in WordPress 5.0.
Beta 1 is a total disaster (unfortunately):
My theme’s meta box in the side in not showing but I have a plugin that shows up and works up perfectly at the bottom. Also, the 5.0 beta 1 experience is miles apart from a site using WP 4.9 and Gut. 4.1 (just got updated).
Some examples:
With WP 4,9/Gut 4.1 I can:
-Disable Gutenberg with a simple filter.
– The Classic Editor Block, SHOWS custom buttons in the toolbar placed by themes and plugins (extremely important for shortcodes for example).
– I can resize the width of the editor from the pathetic 600+ pixels.
– Again, no issues with ACF and ALL types of Meta Boxes.
All these things mentioned above (4 of them) DO NOT work with either the WP 5.0 beta1 (official), or by using the WP beta testing plugin. And all these major issues with just 10/15 minutes of testing.
Gut. 4.1 with WP 4.9 has changes that affect the custom blocks made with ACF 5.8beta1 too, but those are minor which will and can by fixed by Elliot (the ACF developer). But things with WP 5.0 are really messed up, it’s like they rolled the Guten. development all the way back to 6 months or so… simply said, they did not just “embed” the Gutenberg plugin into the core, they “mutated” parts of it for whatever reason. And wow, fresh WP installation 43.2 MB… more than doubled from the previous installation…
I have no idea how this is going to be released in 26 days…. if it is, there is no way I’m updating anything unless things work at the very least as WP 4.9 with the Gut. 4.1 plugin…
What happened to quality control here? Months of testing and making things work with Gutenberg will be lost if this beta is the roadmap to the actual version release. I finally had such high hopes for this thing.