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The WordPress Gutenberg Editor: What it is and why you should care

Executive Summary

The WordPress Gutenberg editor, a complete reimagining of the post-editing workflow, is currently on track to roll out as early as January 2018, and may mean some significant changes. Here’s how to make sure you’re ready.

Details, Tips, Recommendations & Takeaways

Probably the biggest news about WordPress in the last few months has been around the Gutenberg editor. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about it — discussion has largely been confined to developers and theme creators. That’s a shame, though because the introduction of Gutenberg will definitely change the way you work with WordPress. The biggest question we have right now is how many of the things we use every day in WordPress are going to break when they push the update.

So what do you need to know about Gutenberg? Well, let’s start with post editing. We’ll do our best to keep this short! The standard WordPress editor looks like this:

Technical Penguins Guide to the WordPress Gutenberg Editor: A screenshot of the 2017 post editor in WordPress. It consists of a text box with a toolbar over the top of it with different formatting options.

There’s one content area. You type your post into it. Anything fancier or different is accomplished via meta boxes (which are basically everything on the post screen that’s not the editor, so your fields for Yoast SEO, Social Warfare, grid layouts, script insertions, or even where the featured image goes), via the inclusion of shortcodes, or via whole-editor replacements like Divi, Beaver Builder, Thrive, etc.

Technical Penguins Guide to the WordPress Gutenberg editor: A screenshot of what the new Gutenberg editor is proposed to look like. It's largely a white input area, with some formatting on the right side.

The new version starts you with a larger content area, one that fills nearly the entire screen. Rather than typing your whole post into that content area, you’d first create a text block. Then you’d start typing.

You could also create an image block, and move it above or below the text. If you wanted to insert your image block in the middle of that text, you'd split the text block into two blocks, and drag the

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