Gutenberg Editor now Available as a Plugin for Testing in WordPress

Gutenberg Editor now available for Testing

If you have been up-to-date with all the latest happening in the WordPress community, you might have definitely heard about the ongoing development of Gutenberg Editor. Well, the wait is finally over! Gutenberg Editor is now available as a plugin for testing in WordPress.

During WordCamp Europe 2017 held in Paris, one of the featured sessions was Om Malik’s exclusive interview with Matt Mullenweg, followed by 20-minute Q&A from the audience. Matt showed a preview of the new Gutenberg editor with dynamic blocks replacing widgets during the interview. The demo video at WordCamp Europe also showed Gutenberg working smoothly in a mobile context.

Well, now coming back to the point the Gutenberg editor plugin is now officially available for download in WordPress.org. However, it is still in its beta phase, so be aware, it could break your site or some features at any time upon installing or playing around with it.

During the WordCamp Europe interview, Mullenweg explained how the new editor simply unifies the UI into blocks that can be placed anywhere. Gutenberg is set to replace widgets, the HTML UI of shortcodes, and blocks previously offered through the TinyMCE toolbar.

“We’ve taken stabs at this before, if you imagine our previous efforts with posts formats – to make it easier to do certain types of media or quote posts or things like that,” Mullenweg said. “That whole concept can now flatten to just being a block. Working all that in, it’s bringing things we’ve been thinking about for a very long time in WordPress.”

Gutenberg Editor has the potential to make WordPress much easier to use. It is a plugin that brings in your Google Photos or your Dropbox that works everywhere i.e. in a post, in a sidebar, in a page, or in a custom post type. The goal of the Gutenberg editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress effortless and fun. The block editor will make it easier to do what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, widgets and the stuff that exists inside TinyMCE.

Gutenberg plugin is now active on more than 300 sites and the first impressions have started to roll in. This is the first time ever that the block editor has been easily accessible to everyone. Gutenberg also offers a unique testing experience; it creates its own menu inside WordPress, so the users don’t have to choose between the old editor and the new one. Activating Gutenberg doesn’t make it an either/or experience and users can test at their own convenience.

However, there might be some shortcomings with the Gutenberg Editor right now as it is still in its beta phase, but, we hope it grows up into something big and useful for every WordPress user to add rich content on their site. Before this feature can be merged into the WordPress core, Matt hopes that we would manage to get ideally over 100, 000 active installations first. If all goes well, the new editor could land in WordPress 5.0.

Here’s the exclusive interview with Matt Mullenweg during WordCamp Europe 2017 including the live demo of Gutenberg:

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