In case you don’t remember, it’s been almost 3 years since WordPress 5.0 and the new block editor were released. In this release, the roadmap of the Gutenberg project was announced, which has been progressively postponed in each of its phases.
Delays in Project Gutenberg
For example, widgets as blocks were planned for version 5.1 (released in March 2019) and have not seen the light until version 5.8 (August 2021), and so on.
It is not that the Gutenberg project has stopped, which continues to advance almost daily, with a great effort by independent developers and Automattic, which has put all the meat on the grill in this editor that would give it a competitive advantage in “its” market.
Of course, sometimes Gutenberg and WordPress updates have incorporated new blocks, improvements in existing ones, but have not always advanced in the really important parts of the project, whose ultimate goal is the complete editing of websites from WordPress, without the need for additional design and layout tools, such as Divi or Elementor.
In fact, I myself, being always very critical with the sequence of the implementation steps of Project Gutenberg, have always bet on this future, and in my courses, I have long used only the block editor to teach how to create websites with WordPress.
However, it must also be recognized that there is still a long way to go for the complete edition of the site, not only in terms of new functionalities but also in terms of making the current ones work well while maintaining compatibility with the entire legacy system.
A missed opportunity
Sometimes I even think that it wasn’t a bad idea to have followed 2 separate developments for a while: WordPress + Gutenberg on one side and ClassicPress on the other, until the point when WP+Gut would be a solid product and both would be merged again, or just completely replace the previous one.
Instead of not having provoked so much criticism and bugs in existing websites, Gutenberg could have been further developed, and only when it would have been ready to release a major upgrade of WordPress for the new future.
But that was a missed opportunity for everyone.
The classic editor is still very much alive
Also with all these delays, all other plans have also been postponed, such as the dreaded end of support for the classic editor, initially announced for December 2021.
But relax, because it has just been announced that WordPress will remain compatible with the classic editor until December 2022, or until it takes.
So you still have more than a year to adapt, train your customers, make changes, before the change is irremediable and catches you by surprise.
For the time being, you can…
- Go back to the classic editor if you have already changed
- Completely remove the block editor
- Use the classic editor even on WordPress.com
There will be time to convert posts created with the classic editor to blocks.
Of course, this does not mean that you should not learn to use the WordPress block editor, because it is the present and the future, but the editor is not only the text box where you write. You will still be able to use those plugins so important for your websites and those of clients who need the meta boxes of the classic editor, something not entirely solved in the block editor, among other things.
