What's New in WordPress 5.0 Update

WordPress is one of the best CMS (Content Management Systems) in the world with a user-friendly interface. It allows you to create a very good and professional looking website without a developer. The best thing, it offers a variety of plugins and themes. But here in this tutorial, I’m going to share What’s New in WordPress 5.0 Update.

December 6, 2018, WordPress Core Development Team has launched the biggest update with WordPress 5.0 version. WordPress is completely revamping and make it more accessible and user-friendly for users.

This updates will impact everything like editor, plugin, and theme. If we talk about the post editor, it will replace your site’s classic editor with the Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg is more than an editor. It is specially developed to enhance the WordPress editor experience.

But the most important thing, make sure that you are ready for the WordPress 5.0 update. Here are the things that you need to know What’s New in WordPress 5.0 release.

What’s New in WordPress 5.0 Update

WordPress 5.0 is fully focused on the following two things,

Gutenberg WordPress Editor
Twenty Nineteen WordPress theme

In addition, minor changes and bugs have been fixed. But actually, it is all about Gutenberg editor and Twenty Nineteen WordPress theme.

What is Gutenberg

Here is the Gutenberg handbook Introduction.

Gutenberg began as a transformation of the WordPress editor — a new interface for adding, editing, and manipulating content. It seeks to make it easy for anyone to create rich, flexible content layouts with a block-based UI. All types of page components are represented as modular blocks, which means they can be accessed from a unified block menu, dropped anywhere on a page, and directly edited to create the custom presentation the user wants.
It is a fundamental modernization and transformation of how the WordPress experience works, creating new opportunities for both users and developers. Gutenberg introduces new frameworks, interaction patterns, functionality, and user experiences for WordPress. And similar to a new macOS version, we will talk about “Gutenberg”, and all the new possibilities it enables, until eventually the idea of Gutenberg as a separate entity will fade and it will simply be WordPress.

In simple words,

Gutenberg is a modern WordPress editor. It is default WordPress editor into WordPress Core version 5.0 and its main goal is to improve WordPress writing experience.

If you think that Gutenberg WordPress Editor is not right for you or there are so many problems using it, you can disable Gutenberg and revert back to the WordPress classic editor.

How to use Gutenberg WordPress Editor

Gutenberg Editor replaces WordPress classic editor and improves your writing experience. After updating to WordPress 5.0, when you write a post with Gutenberg editor, here you will see, everything has changed. You can see screenshot below,

1. Add your blog post title like What’s New in WordPress 5.0 Update.

2. Write your blog post, what’s about.

3. When you click on +Plus button, a window will open. Here you can select available blocks and you can use them for your blog post.

When you click on the Most Used option, here you will see the frequently use blocks,

With widget, you can easily add shortcodes, recent posts, recent comments, categories, and archives.

In embed option, you will see all supported embed options.

In Common Blocks, you can see,

4. This is a undo/redo button that allows you to move forward or backwards when you edit blog post.

5. Here you can setup blog post visibility, Permalink, Category, featured image etc.

6. With this section, you can change text size, text color, text background color and also you can add Additional CSS Class.

7. You can add a featured image for your blog post.

Furthermore, you can also browse all available blocks.

Twenty Nineteen Theme

WordPress 5.0 has launched a new minimal Twenty Nineteen theme. It fully supports Gutenberg editor and includes both front and back-end styles. It is a perfect blogging theme, you can also use it for a static business website. You can read more here.

Official WordPress 5.0 Release Date

The WordPress Development Team targeted the release of WordPress 5.0 on November 19, 2018. But everything was not ready until this date, So this update rolled out on December 6, 2018.

Plugin and Theme Compatibility

Plugins and Themes are the power of WordPress. But the biggest problem, will the plugin and theme support Gutenberg?

The answer is Yes

Many developers have announced for Gutenberg support. While many theme developers are releasing their own Gutenberg blocks.

But check it once to make sure your plugins and themes are Gutenberg compatible.

Backup Your WordPress Site

Take a complete backup of your site before updating to WordPress 5.0. This ensures that there is a problem after updating your WordPress site, you can restore it with the old version again without losing your content.

There is a lot of WordPress backup plugins available in WordPress.org to do this. Just select a good plugin.

How to Update to WordPress 5.0

After officially releasing WordPress 5.0, it will start to show in your WordPress admin dashboard. Just click on update icon or Dashboard >> Update. Then click on the Update Now button. Now it will start updating your site.

While your site is being updated, it will be in maintenance mode. As soon as your updates are complete, your site will return to normal.

Summary

WordPress team has launched WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg editor and Twenty Nineteen WordPress theme on December 16, 2018.

WordPress 5.0 is completely revamping to make it more accessible and user-friendly. In addition, minor changes and bugs have been fixed.

Have ideas, questions or suggestions regarding WordPress 5.0 or Gutenberg WordPress Editor? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

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