Changes are Coming to WordPress

If you’re as passionate about blogging as I am, you’ll be curious and concerned about the fact that WordPress are working on a “revolutionary” new editor. In the coming months, the way in which you compose your blog posts on WordPress.com is going to change quite considerably.

With a lot going on behind the scenes, the tech community and developers behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org are working hard to prepare the new editor, which will be named ‘Gutenberg’ (after Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press back in 1439). The printing press was of course revolutionary, so the fact that WordPress are using that moniker for their new editor should tell us something about their ambitions and the scope of the changes we are likely to see.

But don’t panic – from the research I’ve done it appears that the coming changes will make the editing process simpler and more intuitive, rather than being a brain-ache for bloggers with very little coding knowledge such as myself.

At the heart of the Gutenberg editor will be the introduction of ‘blocks’. A block is a kind of organisational unit for different categories of content, like images, headings, text, or widgets. There will be drop-down menus from which you can choose the type of block content you want and incorporate it into a particular part of a post. Those of you who use MailChimp to run your mailing lists will probably have come across blocks before.

At present, a Google search doesn’t show up many results for ‘Gutenberg and WordPress.com’, but with a new version of WordPress core likely to be released as early as next month (April 2018), it’s likely that we’ll begin to see changes to the editor on WordPress.com later this year. What this will mean for your particular blog may be something that you want to investigate if you’re at all concerned about compatibility issues with your theme, for instance.

Here’s a helpful article with some more info on Gutenberg:

https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/

And if you’ve got a couple of hours to spare (don’t we all?), I recommend watching this video which features WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg talking about the new editor and answering some questions on the subject.