WordPress 5.0 to be Released Tomorrow - But Don't Rush to Upgrade

Hi Everyone,

As you've doubtless heard WordPress 5.0 is to be released tomorrow (December 6th).

Gutenberg, as you know, is to be made part of the core, replacing the current editor, and it is not backward compatible with themes and plugins unless they've been specifically updated to work with Gutenberg.

There have been warnings from both Yoast and WPML that we should not rush to upgrade to 5.0 because in their (extensive) testing WP5.0 is simply not stable enough.

Personally, I will not be updating mine or my clients' sites tomorrow - the first time I have ever deliberately delayed implementing an update.

Both Yoast and WPML have published advice to delay the upgrade to 5.0. Here are the articles:

https://wpml.org/2018/12/wait-before-updating-to-wordpress-5...

https://yoast.com/should-you-update-to-wordpress-5-0/

When you do decide to upgrade I would suggest you may want to install the Classic Editor plugin first. This restores the current editor and you can choose settings that enable you to either completely replace Gutenberg, or replace it selectively.

The approach I'm taking, therefore, is as follows:

1. I will not upgrade to 5.0 tomorrow. All the sites I manage have the Classic Editor plugin installed.
2. Sometime in late January, once the trouble tickets and comments indicate that 5.0 has stabilised, I will change the Classic Editor settings to enable me to selectively enable Gutenberg on my development sites (but not on my, or my clients', production sites)
3. As the new editor stabilises I will move sites steadily to the new editor, checking each one carefully before moving the next.

IMPORTANT: be sure to take a full site backup of your sites before upgrading..!

I do urge you to read those two articles I linked to - especially if you are using WPML or the Yoast SEO plugin. I would also recommend that anyone using a page builder plugin be very wary of updating unless you're absolutely sure there will be no problems.

Cheers,

Martin.