Remkus de Vries Remkus is Manager of Partnerships at Yoast and also focusses on our Translate Yoast site. Additionally, he works on the WordPress Project organizing and mentoring WordCamps.

It’s been a busy week! With the focus fully on getting WordPress 5.0 ready, we’ve seen a lot of news around the Gutenberg integration in the past few days. So let’s dive right in!

Update! WordPress 5.0 is about to be launched soon. Should you update to WordPress 5.0 right away? Read Joost’s advice!

Release date concerns

There’s isn’t much time left until the planned release of WordPress 5.0. With the WordPress 5.0 beta 3 still not being stable enough with the inclusion of Gutenberg, there has been a lot of concern about the release date.

Of most note, our CPO, Joost de Valk raised some hefty concerns in a personal blog post where he calls for WordPress 5.0 needing a different timeline. Now, this may seem odd to you given the fact that we as a company have invested so heavily into Gutenberg this past year. Ten people, including the only real accessibility developer for most of the time, to be exact. However, Joost raises two really good reasons for not sticking to the current timeline:

There are some severe accessibility concerns.

The overall stability of the project isn’t where it needs to be yet.

For the full reasoning, do check out his post in full.

Similar concerns are voiced by, for instance, Mark Root-Wiley where he states WordPress 5.0 isn’t ready. Additionally, there are folks like Ned Zimmerman over at Pressbooks, for instance, that don’t see enough parity in Gutenberg features for them to integrate into yet.

Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress 5.0 release lead said after yesterday’s Core chat:

I am luke-warm on the 19th, but not because of the number of open issues (which isn’t a good measure or target) — more that we’ve been a day or two behind a few times now. –Matt Mullenweg

There is another reason why releasing WordPress 5.0 Monday the 19th is not favorable and that’s Black Friday. There have been many voices arguing that releasing such an impactful WordPress upgrade right before, arguably, the busiest weekend for is bringing too much risk. Especially e-commerce sites.

WordPress 5.0 is postponed!

So, ultimately all the issues outlined above have made the Core team make the decision to postpone the 5.0 release. The new release date is set at the 27th of November. Matias Venture says the following:

After listening to a lot of feedback — as well as looking at current issues, ongoing pull requests, and general progress — we’re going to take an extra week to make sure everything is fully dialed in and the release date is now targeted for November 27th.

More information can be found on the Make WordPress Core blog.

WordPress 5.0 beta 3 has been released

WordPress 5.0 Beta 3 has been officially released, and it includes an updated version of the Twenty Nineteen theme. Of course, it also includes the latest version of Gutenberg, 4.2. The previous default themes were updated as well.

Building sites with Gutenberg

Yes, there may be reasons to postpone WordPress 5.0, but that doesn’t mean you can’t already build great things with Gutenberg. Bill Erickson published an interesting post yesterday. In it, he explains how he’s already built sites integrating with Gutenberg. From simple to more complex sites, Bill has some solid advice for those of you building websites.

What if you’re not ready for Gutenberg?

So, you don’t think your site(s) are ready for Gutenberg yet yourself? Well, then it’s good to know that the WordPress Core team has committed itself to officially supporting The Classic Editor plugin until the 31st of December, 2021. You can read more about that in Gary Pendergast post over at Make WordPress Core.

JavaScript Language packs have landed in WordPress

Fresh off the press: JavaScript Language packs have finally been merged into WordPress. Our CTO, Omar Reiss explains on the Make WordPress Core blog:

We can now translate strings in JavaScript files and distribute them via https://translate.wordpress.org. This functionality will soon be expanded to also work for plugins and themes. This is a major milestone for JavaScript development in WordPress and completes the JavaScript package inclusion focus. – Omar Reiss

One more step into making sure WordPress is as inclusive as possible when it comes to translations. And a great one at that!

Bonus

If using one of the available WordPress hosting companies isn’t hardcore enough for you, then maybe SpinupWP is! It’s a new service released by Delicious Brains Inc. and it looks like a very neat solution for self-managed WordPress servers.

WordPress Watch series