Today marks the official release date of WordPress 5.0 and its Gutenberg editor. In unrelated news, December 6th is also St Nicholas day which is celebrated by children all over Europe!

The most wide-reaching changes are down to the Gutenberg editor which seeks to redefine how posts and pages are written. Matt Mullenweg describes the change as:

 

The overall goal is to simplify the first-time user experience of WordPress — for those who are writing, editing, publishing, and designing web pages. The editing experience is intended to give users a better visual representation of what their post or page will look like when they hit publish. As I wrote in my post last year, “Users will finally be able to build the sites they see in their imaginations.”

You can read a more extensive FAQ and a bit of a background on how Gutenberg came about on his blog.

If you're updating your WordPress site today, you will have to make sure that you'll:

• Update your theme. If you've made any custom changes to your theme since installing it initially then make sure you save those.


• Update your plugins. This is vital as your site will otherwise most likely not be compatible.

If your site is still not looking quite right or if you feel that Gutenberg isn't what you want right now - you can download the old editor by searching the plugins section for 'classic editor' and change the 'Replace the Gutenberg Editor with the Classic editor' in your writing settings.

Had enough of updating and fixing and the hassle of managing your WordPress site? We offer a fully managed WordPress service from just £4.99/month [special 50% OFF offer, ends 31/12/2018] where we do the tech so that you can focus on your site's content.

 

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