Things to Know About WordPress 5.0

WordPress 5.0 introduces a new editor, called Gutenberg. It is a major change that makes editing block-centric. Your friends in the Social Media Support Committee found Gutenberg to be unacceptably unstable when we tried out the beta version. Therefore, we advise you that you use it at your own risk. Eventually you will need to use it, but if you are technically challenged and intimidated by instability in software, we recommend that you use the Classic Editor for now. We will come back to you later and urge you to adopt Gutenberg after we are confident in its stability. We expect the Classic Editor to be supported for a while but not indefinitely.

The link at the beginning of the previous paragraph takes you to an announcement about the introduction of Gutenberg. There is an explanation of trying out their beta versions before they release 5.0. We do not recommend testing their beta version. Your friends at the SMSC did that and suffered pain. One of us lost the home page on his lodge’s web site and had to reconstruct it. Wait for them to officially release 5.0. (I strongly disagree with language scolds that object to splitting infinitives.) 

When you start to use Gutenberg, be aware that you can edit already existing pages without worrying about blocks — at least, up to a point. We don’t know yet what the limitations on that are. If you create a new page, you should use blocks. A block can contain a header, a paragraph, html-code, an image, a list, or some other object. There is a plus-sign with a circle around it at the top left corner of the editor for adding blocks. There are navigation tools on the left sides of blocks that appear when you mouse over them that allow you to move blocks above or below other blocks.

Again, when 5.0 is released, we recommend that you install and use the Classic Editor plugin until we advise you that we consider Gutenberg to be stable.