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.
I highly recommend you do not install the Gutenberg plugin on your live website yet.
Just click on the Dismiss X in the top right-hand corner.
Why Dismiss the Gutenberg call out?
You don’t want to risk breaking your website. Gutenberg is a long, long way from being ready to install on your live website.
What is Gutenberg?
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.
When will Gutenberg be ready to activate on my website?
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.
It’s exciting but far too early to go live in any form on your main, income-producing website.
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.
Experiment on a test site only
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