4.9 and Gutenberg

I am really happy with the 4.8 release: the potential impact on new users and community event attendance is big, and the entire community really pulled together to make it a success.

I’m sure many people are curious and anxious about the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ editor. You can of course follow along and participate on GitHub, and we’re hoping that a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party for easy install and usage will be available soon.

I’d like to give Gutenberg some extra gestation time as a plugin, ideally getting it to 100k active sites over the next month or two, before we merge. It’ll be easier (and safer) to get people to install and auto-update a plugin than switch their sites to trunktrunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision.. We could even put a promo for it in 4.8.1.

In the meantime I think we can do another user-focused 4.9 release with the theme of editing code and managing plugins and themes, doing v2s and polishing some features we brought into WP last year. Weston and Mel already have some good ideas there, and we can start to discuss and brainstorm at the Dev chat next week. This will also allow the Gutenberg-driven release to be 5.0, which is a nice-to-have but not the primary driver of this decision.

Hopefully I will see some of y’all at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. EU, and regardless be sure to tune in to my session tomorrow which you can livestream from the WordCamp Europe homepage.