Sounds dramatic right? Not so nice if your live website goes down. So yes, I’m trying to get your attention, proud WordPress website owner. This head’s up is for you.
Late yesterday (Thursday, Aug 2) WordPress 4.9.8 was released (for most automatically) so when you log in to the dashboard of your website, you’ll see a callout to install the Gutenberg plugin.
You don’t want to risk breaking your website. Gutenberg is a long, long way from being ready to install on your live website.
It’s an exciting evolution for WordPress and will transform the editing your site. It’s the new block-based editor WordPress is planning to roll into the core of its next big update – WordPress 5.0.
Gutenberg is still in development. If you think of all the thousands of themes and plugins that’ll need to be compatible with Gutenberg, there’s a massive amount of work going on behind the scenes.
Most of us are going to block its activation when it’s included in the core of WordPress until we are 100% confident it’s fully compatible with the themes and plugins we are using and the bugs have been squashed. This could take multiple months or even up to a year.
In the meantime, we need to experiment and play with Gutenberg but only on a test site. You can see a live demo and read more at https://wordpress.org/gutenberg
Tina Cook is a Media Marketing Strategist and Web Designer at tina.media. Tina is a Certified Guerrilla Marketing Coach and Certified Social Media Marketing Consultant.