What Is Gutenberg?
Gutenberg is a WordPress project that aims to give users more flexibility in the design of their content. Essentially, the project aims to replace the current editor, which performs mostly as a word processor, with a more visual and structured interface. Currently, Gutenberg is a plugin, and it grants users the ability to modify their content similarly to how Visual Composer or other drag-and-drop editors do—albeit in a simplified and highly intuitive way.
The Pieces that can get affected on Your Website
Gutenberg is a massive undertaking and will likely touch a large number of endpoints within your website. These are the three areas we’ll be scouring for issues:
- Your Theme: Gutenberg comes with its own set of styles for content. Is your theme compatible? What will it look like with Gutenberg active?
- Your Plugins: It’s possible that Gutenberg might interact with your other plugins in unexpected ways. We’ll look at what those might be, and what to do about any issues that arise.
- Your Content: Gutenberg will affect how your content itself is displayed. We’ll examine how that might change what your pages look like, and go over some potential fixes if you’re having problems.
You can try out Gutenberg right now and test it on your website
There is a Gutenberg plugin already available so that you can play around with the new editor, get a feel for it, and more importantly, test your site with it. It will give you great insight into how the addition of Gutenberg to the WordPress core may affect your site.
If you have plugins that are not working with the editor plugin, now is the time to contact the plugin developer so they can be upgrading their plugin before Gutenberg becomes a part of the core code. If you get an undesirable response from the plugin author, it may be time to find a new plugin.
If you are concerned that adding the plugin may cause problems with your live site, you should get a staging site to try new things and test your plugins and theme without affecting your current public site. Your newly updated site can then be moved to your public site when you’ve worked out all the problems that the new editor and plugins may cause.
The plugin is changing weekly, if not daily, so it will also pay to continue to test it in the coming weeks. The Gutenberg developers are asking for feedback, so this is your time to participate in molding this plugin to what will work best for you, your company, your clients, or your website. We can all be a part of the best solution here.
What to Do When There Are Too Many Issues
Did you run into a problem? Don’t panic! There’s still some time before Gutenberg hits WordPress Core.
First, record what the error is and what steps led to the error. The more information that you can gather, the better. Pass all of this information along to the Gutenberg team. With luck, they’ll be able to determine the issue and fix it in a future release.
If you were working on a staging site, then at this point, that’s all you can do for now. Continue to check the release notes to see if your problem is solved, or possibly work on solving it yourself.
If you were working on your live site, deactivating Gutenberg should put everything back to normal. If not, then now is the time to revert to that backup you made!
Do you need help?
If you don’t succeed please don’t hesitate to contact CreateWP for some help.
