Quick Tip: What Is Inside WordPress 5.0 Update?

The first and only major WordPress update of 2018 has been released on December, 6th. It brings a lot of improvements to overall workflow of any WordPress administrator or author. The main change rebuilds the WordPress post editor completely, making it up-to-date and able to comprehend with most of the modern and future tasks of a web project.

We will summarize the most important new features of WordPress after the 5.0 update in this article. Moreover, we will show how these features influence your WordPress post creation process and how they upgrade it to a future level of interaction between you and your admin dashboard.

Important Update Info

WordPress 5.0 is the major update. It means you need to permit the installation of this update manually via your WordPress dashboard. Some managed WordPress hostings do provide the automatic installation for the major updates but it is better to reassure whether the update has been installed on your WordPress website personally anyway.

Gutenberg Block Based Editor

There were lots of discussions about Gutenberg Editor but it has been released anyway. Gutenberg completely changes the visual part of the WordPress post editor. It could appear uncomfortable for the first days as it happens often to any new thing we use. The overall impression about Gutenberg is still better than most WordPress critics suggest.

The main idea of Gutenberg Editor is to use blocks inside the editor instead of text window with lots of shortcodes and buttons around it. Each block can have its own settings: fonts, colors, margins, backgrounds, embed elements and so on. You can easily move, edit and delete any block as in any modern drag-n-drop editor.

Gutenberg already includes the most popular pieces of writing content as blocks: text, image, video, audio, photo gallery, list, cover image, quote, media, button, and much more. Widgets and shortcodes are also added to the blocks division, including the most popular ready-to-use blocks like recent posts, comments, categories or archives.

Embed options have been made significantly easier to use. The special submenu Embeds inside Blocks already includes nearly anything you could need: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Flickr and lots of other embed elements without additional need of customization or optimization.

Another great feature of Gutenberg is called Reusable Blocks. Any block you create during a post writing can be saved to the special Reusable Block directory. Later on you can use this saved block in any other new or old post by just selecting it from Reusable Blocks submenu. It saves time and effort significantly!

Old Content Editing with WordPress 5.0

Any article or post created before WordPress 5.0 update can be edited both in old and new versions of editor by your choice. By default, you will open old posts with the “classic” version of editor. You can also switch to Gutenberg editor for old posts and convert the content to blocks. All the features of new editor could be used only after this conversion.

Old Editor Usage

If you do not like Gutenberg and want to switch to the previous version of editor, it is still possible. You need to install a simple and free WordPress plugin called Classic Editor. It converts your admin dashboard to and old and faithful version. It is however still crucial to install WordPress 5.0 update even if you do not like Gutenberg at all because the question of malware protection is more important than any design preferences.

New Default WordPress Theme — Twenty Nineteen

WordPress 5.0 update comes with the new theme installed by default for each new project on the platform. Twenty Nineteen is a simple and minimalistic WordPress theme which is fully compatible with all new Gutenberg features and peculiarities. The unlimited block content creation awaits you with Twenty Nineteen!

WordPress 5.0 Compatibility with Released Themes and Plugins

Most WordPress developers have updated their products in correspondence with the major update. WordPress 5.0 has taken a long way before the release and all developers have enough opportunities to get ready to it. If you find any theme or plugin working incorrectly after the update, then you have 3 options to deal with it:

1. reach a plugin or theme`s developer and ask for the needed update (it is especially crucial for premium plugins)
2. download, install and activate Classic Editor to use the old version of WordPress
3. deactivate theme or plugin and use some updated alternatives.