Jump in, the Water’s Not Bad

Upgrading to WordPress 5.0

WordPress released 5.0 earlier this month. Nicknamed “Bebo”, the most headlining feature of the release is the new Gutenberg editor. It’s also the source of most confusion and fear among WordPress users. But is that concern truly warranted?

Earlier this year, when we were getting our first looks at Gutenberg, I was with the nay-sayers. It looked to me like a massive headache I was going to have to undertake with all of our maintenance clients, plus likely see a surge of incoming work from those we’ve built websites for but don’t maintain. And I was hesitant about the release for good reason- my testing of the editor was less than good.

Bugs, broken themes, and problems were everywhere. Page builders weren’t yet supporting Gutenberg, so entire websites were proving to break when testing Gutenberg. And as a developer supporting numerous high-traffic e-commerce websites based on WordPress, this was daunting. Most of the themes and builders I work with via these clients were relatively quiet around this time too.

Fast forward to today. And I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong. Support for Gutenberg is rolling out quickly. Converting my largest clients over on staging sites has proven to be seamless and, more often than not, problem-free. In fact, I’ve only encountered but a few situations in which I had to actually make adjustments.

The website you’re looking at right now is running on WordPress 5.0 too. I’ve upgrades this to simply experience the block-based editor more for myself. And I’m enjoying it. If you’ve ever written for Medium then you’re going to feel at home. The editor feels good. It’s responsive. It’s clean. And it’s easy to use. Long posts aren’t so daunting anymore. And breaking your content out into the blocks makes it more logical and visually distinct.

Are you holding out on upgrading? What has your testing looked like so far? What are your clients saying about the upgrade, if they even know it’s about to happen, or has happened?

My biggest gripe right now? Grammarly seems to be hit or miss… and that’s literally it.

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