 Today we're all here to listen to Glenn Landrum talking about the introduction to Gutenberg and the future of WordPress editing. Grant is a leader of digital teams focused on strategy and high-value, high-scale digital projects for companies such as Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and more. Recently, as the Vice President of Client Strategy at TENA, a leading agency in enterprise WordPress development, Grant managed digital strategy teams managing some of the largest, most complex WordPress implementations on the web. He's been using WordPress both personally and professionally for 10 years, more than 10 years, and that is quite a while consulting on her WordPress blog. Today he's going to walk you through an introduction to Gutenberg, and you've added you're coming in WordPress 5.0, touching on the immediate changes you can expect as well as the impact on the future of WordPress. And afterwards, we'll move back to questions. I'm going to be bringing this microphone to you, so I'll come back up and stuff. Thank you. Awesome. Well, welcome everybody. It's a pleasure to be here with you. This is an introduction to Gutenberg and the future of editing. There's some awesome Gutenberg talks coming at you guys later today, talking about storytelling and blogging with Gutenberg, SEO, and then I think a couple of afternoon talks are going to dig into more of the development. But the organizers and I thought that it would be a good idea to first dig into an introduction. For those of you who have not had the opportunity to poke around with Gutenberg yet, then you have a little bit, but you want to understand a little bit more about what's going on. So the first half of the presentation is going to just be an introduction. We'll talk a little bit about what Gutenberg is, how it's different from what there is now, what it really means, and the impact and the scope of it. And then I'm going to fast forward a little bit and talk about what it kind of means for the larger WordPress project that's coming down the road. And how do you all think about Gutenberg as you talk about it with your customers, if you're a freelancer or an agency, or just how to think about it for yourself as you manage your own site. Let's dive right in. Well, first, you can get the slides if you want to follow along. There's lots of screenshots and things, so I've got a bit there, Gutenpress, if you want to follow along there. So, dive right in. So Gutenberg, it's important to think about, when you start thinking about Gutenberg and those of you who haven't looked at it yet, is that this isn't an iteration. This isn't a small update. This is a transformation. This is a brand new way of building and editing content in WordPress. Both under the hood, technically speaking, how the editor is built and how it functions and how it delivers content and mirrors back in the front end, as well as the UI. This is going to be a big impact for end users. It's words like revolution right have been thrown around as far as what this update means for WordPress and what it means for editing and writing content, as well as building pages and building sites. Let's take a really quick look at visually what we're talking about here. So this is a classic editor. You guys should all be really familiar with this. You've got one big blob of content, and the terminal that I really like is blobs to blocks. Blob is a constant strategy term that's been thrown around for a while now. But that's really, philosophically, one of the big changes is we're moving from a blob of content in a content editor to blocks of content in a content editor. So classic editor you guys are all familiar with. You've got one big blob of content in a classic editor, and that translates into a thread and it outputs everything into the content of a post or a page. Everybody should be really familiar with this super simple straightforward. In a Gutenberg world, we're moving to blocks of content. We've got a tidal block, we've got a paragraph block, paragraph block, and you can have all sorts of different blocks. But we're moving to more modular, more visual, more block-based editor. And on the surface this feels kind of straightforward, which is good. That's how it should feel. On the front end, same type of thing, your blocks get output into the content of your post or your page. There are tons and tons and tons of blocks that are in the shit with the first version of this. For those of you who have already installed the Gutenberg plugin, you've seen a lot of these blocks. As recently as two days ago, blocks are still being removed and new blocks being added as far as what's coming in the 5.0 release. These are just a few of the default blocks. Basically everything you'd expect, paragraphs, headings, quotes, galleries. But also some new blocks, a lot of layout blocks, column block, button block. There's a lot of new things coming as we think about how to use a more visual, more block-based editor and kind of a new WordPress world. So really quickly, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Brett Landrum. Kind of great introduction, but I just wanted to note that I'm at Brett Landrum on Twitter. If you want to connect with me, I'd love to connect with you all. Send me questions. If you have any questions during the presentation, I can read them off Twitter at the end, or we can go ahead and read them live. So we're moving from blocks to blocks. It's a fundamental, almost revolutionary change to WordPress. One thing that I think is worth doing is stopping and asking why. Why make such a big change? We all know changes are particularly in web software. WordPress is doing great. Over 30% of the internet, all we hear about is WordPress is growing in popularity, that it's easy to use, that it's straightforward. And one of the reasons why people choose WordPress is because it's intuitive and everybody knows it. So why make a fundamental change? Why make a revolutionary change to the way that one of the core things about WordPress works? Well, a few reasons. One is creating a more visual editing experience. So with the proliferation of online site-building tools, things like Squarespace, Wix, even page-building tools for WordPress, a more modern web user is getting more used to and actually is expecting a more visual editing experience. Think about media, where you're editing actually what your thing looks like. Gutenberg promises to give us a bit more of a visual editing experience. This is a promise in which I think it really, really delivers. It is one where WordPress needs to catch back up and get a little bit ahead of what the broader CMS market is delivering. If we were to stick with the classic editor, I think the frustrations that come along with that classic editor, who knows the term save and surprise? Anybody heard that? It's one of the guys toss around an agency a whole lot where a client or somebody is editing WordPress and they lay out their paragraphs and they put an image and they write a line of images and they think it's everything looks great. They save and they go look at their page and it looks surprised. Nothing like what it looked like in the classic editor. Maybe it's because their theme styles are doing something a little bit different with it. Maybe it's because they thought they put that image floated in between paragraph two and three, but really in the HTML it's floated midway through the third paragraph and it shows up walking on the front end. Gutenberg promises to get rid of a lot of that save and surprise by making the back end a more visual editing experience and translating that and really showing you what it's like that you're going to be editing. So the next reason is more granular control. This feels super straight forward and we almost take it for granted when we talk about block based editors. But because these are individual blocks this is such a fundamental change in the granular control that we have over blocks. So in this block you'll see I've got a title, a normal paragraph, and then I've started to customize this middle paragraph. We've got the block settings bar over here and I've selected a color background, color text. I've been able to highlight out the specific paragraph and customize it right from the good of my editor. Now this could be possible in the previous classic editor, but you probably have to edit some HTML out of class and then edit that class with CSS to your normal average end user and that's just not an accessible thing to do. It's certainly not intuitive, but the Gutenberg editor, this is just specific to the iceberg of the type of modular control that you're going to be able to have over things like paragraphs. Let's take our image example that I threw out previously about the right and left aligned. Now images are their own blocks. It's an image block. We've got this great settings bar right on the right hand side where I can control everything about the image, the width, the height, the alignment, and it will live update here amongst the other blocks and show me amongst the other blocks how is this going to look. Much more visual, much more granular, much more accessible for the end user to use. So the third reason and probably one of the most exciting, one of the things that I was most excited as an agency person when I first started using Gutenberg is more powerful editing and page building. So things that you previously just could not do in the classic editor without short codes and everybody knows short codes mix back, right? Most of the time not great. Things like columns, right, are now going to be extremely easy to do right within the UI for you as well as for your end user. Things that you might have had to build a page template for before and do on the PHP and CSS or again short codes will be able to do buttons. Things as straightforward as spacers. Let's go back. Spacers, so we can add bottom margin to our paragraphs. What if you have a couple images in a row and you don't like the margins being added? You don't want a lot of margin between the first and second image but you want a little bit of margin after the third image. Things like a spacer block will allow you to create space within your poster page wherever you want. Another use case I like here is giving a block quote a little bit of room to breathe, right? Let's say you have a hole where you really want to stand out. I'm going to bump up the text size but then I bump up the text size and there's not a whole lot of space in between the two paragraphs on either side. Throw a couple of spacer blocks on either side and give that block quote a little bit of room to breathe. People are going to be able to more powerfully build and lay out pages and posts with these more visual editors and actually see what it's going to look like in the back end So a block that just got added on Friday's beta is the media and text block. How many landing pages have we all built where it's a media item and some text on it and then maybe we've got some center text below it and then media item on the right with text on the left and then some center text below it, right, letting those pages out and that we would have either had an engagement page builder type of situation or go ahead and build that template from scratch. Now these are things that you can very modally very quickly set up and do for it. Reusable content blocks, this is one of my favorite. So any block that you create, you can go ahead and press a button and say I want to make it a reusable block. You save it, so I'm saving, let's say I have a profile, like a profile of me that I want to put at the top or the bottom of every article that I write but I don't want to build it into the single dot page template because there's other authors on my site and I don't want it showing up at the bottom of every single post. I can create a reusable profile block, just a paragraph block. I save it as grants profile block and then any time I want to use that on any other post or any other page or on the site, I just search for it up and there it is saved right away it started into it and the cool thing is those blocks are all linked so if my profile updates, I go and update it in one place and it updates across every single post, every single page that's used on the site and that you just do just like that. Really, really cool block. And last but not least, widgets in dynamic content so you can insert widgets into any post or page. So here I'm going to insert a latest post widget. Just search for widgets. This could be anything. This could be a MailChimp signup widget. This could be any old widget that you have activated on your site and I've dropped three of my latest posts in the middle of a post or a page. I can choose layout options like list or grid. This can be customized with CSS. I can add custom classes that can be targeted with CSS. Just really powerful post and page building tools that are going to be accessible to you with the default blocks that are going to ship. And again, so all of this stuff was probably doable before either via short codes or via page builder plugins but the cool thing is that many of those solutions are definitely not easy to use. Not as easy as the last header. They took the learning curve and many of our clients just couldn't end up learning how to use it. There wasn't a time where they invested there. They certainly weren't intuitive. If easy to use is a bar here, intuitive is a little bit higher of a bar where it just kind of makes sense and people understand how to use it. And it certainly, even higher bar, is keeping up with the modern trend of visual page building and visual CMSs that are around there in the market because that's a really good job of catching WordPress up to that broader market. So a good part of life from that is that users will finally be able to build the sites they see in their imagination so they'll never have to see a short code again. I think for those of us who build sites, we kind of take short codes for granted in those tricky ways that we've found a way to build more robust functionality or editors and more page builders but they're really, really frustrating for end users and end users don't have a lot. They get those things and syntax is clunky. They get it differently with different variables. Some don't need variables. So it's really nice to be thinking beyond the time you've seen the editor and thinking about the more powerful page building and experience that you might consider. So one of the features that I'm the most excited about and it's one of the most forward-looking features of the Nuleenberg editor, but it's not gotten as much publicity. It's not been written about as much. I think I've only seen a couple of people talking about this one. The idea of template. So the examples that I've shown you before, it's kind of a blank slate. You can add a title block, you add a paragraph block and you start to build a post or a page from scratch. Pretty much what you think of as a traditional CMSAA experience. Blank slate is sit down when you start writing. But as we all know, at least those who build websites for clients, you have a client with a blank slate with a page or a post and they're not always going to deliver on that vision of what you design for them. You give them four or five page templates. You set up a couple of examples where they create a new page on their own. They call you and they say, it's not working out like expected or you visit their site. It just doesn't quite look like what you design because maybe they forgot to do something in the way that you built it for them. So the idea of templating in Gutenberg is that you can actually, by page template or post type, create a default set of blocks that are already pre-added to the page when they go and create a new page or a new post. So in this example, a full width image, a couple of headings and some paragraphs, a button with place holders. You can define all of this in the Blocks API and you can even make it so that they cannot remove blocks. You can create a custom post type. Maybe it's team members and every single team member has to have these six blocks in there filled out in order to deliver on that vision, deliver on that visual design and all they have to do is fill it out every time. This is in the Blocks API that's coming out soon. This is going to be one of those APIs that I think is going to be built on and really expanded. I think theme authors, how many times have you heard about people buying custom themes and then they get in there and they can't really figure out how to set it up and make it look like the demo that they saw online. This is probably going to be something leveraged by theme authors where they set up page templates and post types in a very customized way. What I just talked about is a lot of the major features that are going to be shipping in the upcoming 5.0 release WordPress, the new Gutenberg editor going from a block base editor to a block base editor. I want to talk a little bit about the future. What's coming after that? A lot of what most people don't know is that the Gutenberg editor revolutionizing the pages of post creation process is just phase one of this grander vision. It's just phase one of this project. What it does is it lays a foundation for bigger things when it comes to page building and customization. We're going to talk about a couple of different examples and try to paint this vision for what's coming down the pipe. Now that we have modular blocks in the editor, think about something like Co-Ed, something that has not previously been possible without ripping out the editor altogether and shoving in something completely different. Imagine that because it's modular somebody could build a plugin that adds states to each of the blocks and allows different people to be editing different blocks at the same time. This block is being edited by Nadmin and I'm down here, Grant is down here adding a block. This doesn't currently exist, I don't know if there's any ongoing work on a plugin like this, but I imagine in the future, because we're more modular and broken down, no longer be locked out on a page or post level basis like we are now, we may be able to get in there and edit together, which would expand WordPress to 335 people working on the same piece of content at a time. People at the New York Times built their own CMS specifically to build their own custom publishing workflows, because they wanted upwards of 50 people to be working on the same breaking news story all at the same time. This would open up WordPress to a more like that. Custom blocks. So custom blocks are already being developed by a lot of developers out there who have seen the writing on the wall. There's already a number of custom blocks that you can install in a more rapid custom block development over the coming weeks, months and years as WordPress 5.0 comes out. This is one actually being worked on by the automatic core community team, so MelChoice, Ian Dunn, who I think is pop around here somewhere, but this is for the work camp websites. This would be a speakers block, so what you'd have is you'd enter the speakers block and you could either output all of the speakers from the speakers custom post guide, or you could pick specific speakers to output and it'll automatically go grab all those posts, output them visually, how they're going to show up, and give you a bunch of really cool options. Do I, what size do I want them to be? Do I want the images to be there? What is the alignment of the images? Do I want it in a grid or a list? Right, these are ways to build pages rapidly, dynamically with content around your site. This is just, again, the tip of the iceberg of the custom block development you guys are going to see coming out of after-boop relations. So finally I want to talk about the program. So Morton Ray Hendrickson did a great talking about this in the work camp US. Great, great talk. He spent about 30 minutes talking about it. I spent about five. But this is one of the most exciting things that is on the radar and it's probably one of the more ambitious goals of the Gutenberg block based editor project. But that is what you see has never really been what you've gotten when it comes to building a post for a page. And that is to say, remember my example of the classic editor, it's a blog of content that blog of content gets output on your page, but that's not all that's going on in your site. Before an end user to build a page and looking at the editor and just be controlling that area of the site is not a very intuitive thing. It's not really what you see is what you get within this tiny little box maybe. If you do it perfectly and you have it, what about so Gutenberg is moving to a block based and that's making this part better, but it's still confined to the content here. What about all these other areas? What about your header, your navigation? What about your sidebar? What about your footer? What about all the other modular areas of your site? You still don't have great visibility in the post and page editor into how your site is actually going to look. We saw a lot of conflicts happen here when it happens and it seems like I'm writing a story about nonprofits outreach communications in Southern Africa and it's a really heavy, really sensitive topic, maybe in 2000, 2000, or the expose and it looks great in the editor and all that stuff and preview it and even that looks really good but then when it gets served up the things that are in the sidebar are really culturally ads. It's like that doesn't work very well, right? It's still a disjointed experience and the first version of the block based editor doesn't really solve that. The first version of block based editor is still really focused on this content area. Another part that's really frustrating for your end user is that they edit this page and they get a look at how they want, but in order to get the other areas of the site looking how they want, they got to go to a number of different places within their parent's menus to get your menu just right. The parent's customize maybe to make sure your site title is the logo or your site tagline there. Maybe your parent's theme options because maybe if they're running a custom theme there are tons of theme options that they need to customize to get their header looking the way they want. You got to go to a parent's widgets to get your sidebar and if you have multiple sidebars, great. If you don't, you're stuck with one set up. The parent's menu is for the footer. The parent's customized for the footer. You got to go all these places just to get all these things. The block base editor doesn't really solve that. Again, it's focused more on the poor thing, but what if it could solve these other areas? That's the vision and the ambition that this core project has for this block base editor is what if we could take the same concept of taking one admin screen with a blob of content moving that into blocks, moving that into a more visual editor and apply that to all these other areas of your site. It's going to give us more visual and more intuitive site building, site layout, template building experience. What if all of these things were blocks? Block, block, block, block, block. You can add as many blocks as you want. What if every widget was a block? What if any footer items were a block? What if everything was a block that you could visually layout, choose from a plethora of custom blocks, build your own blocks? What if you weren't confined to the traditional content types of menus and widgets and posts and all of those things? So this is from the actual WordPress handbook that's been up for a while. A rough road map is V1 of this block base editor project is a post page editor. That's what we spent a lot of time talking about today. That's been a major focus and good debate around beauty work and what it does. But second is the page template editor. What if you could create entire templates with blocks? And only a part of that template is the content that you're actually writing. Another part of that is other things. And then three, what if you could build your entire site with blocks visually from the back of your site? One of my favorite quotes from Morton who is leagues ahead of me on this debate and definitely a guy who is Googling and checking out his toxic word camp. He's got a great article that I linked to in the resources at the end of this slide deck. But he says in the future after this fulfillment of the Gutenbergian revolution as he calls it, you will go to WordPress to create views by writing some content and are pulling in different blocks This is really, really interesting because it kind of turns the whole intuitive familiarity of WordPress on its head. And that can be a little bit scary. But I like the way that they are starting with the post-page editor where it makes a lot of sense, right? Where there's a lot of frustration from the users. They're going to kind of matriculate this new world out there, get people used to that and over time they see this start to spread out. So what happened? We covered quite a bit. We talked about what's coming. We talked about what's coming up in the future. So, quick review. We've got the final 5.0 beta 5 coming out in just a few days. I think that's over the Wednesday or Thursday. We've got the release candidate 1 scheduled for the 19th and we've got the 5.0 release scheduled for 11.27. It's just got, this is the new schedule posted as of Friday. So it's just gotten almost out by the week on these deadlines. So WordPress 5.0 is coming and it's coming really, really soon. First thing is don't forget. This is a revolution. This is a big change but there's a lot to be excited about and there's really not a whole lot to be afraid to think about. For a few reasons. One, you can start testing now. The Gutenberg plugin has readily available. It's been readily available for a long time. I've been running it in production on my site for a long time. It is buggy, right? I think a lot of people are tuned into this conversation. There are a lot of concerns around whether it's ready or not. These are real good problems that a lot of people are focused on and that I know we're going to solve but it's not a reason to shy away from updating the 5.0. It's not a reason to shy away from starting to test. This is absolutely the future of what WordPress is going to look like and it's not really worth dragging your feet as far as updating and really getting under the hood and learning this stuff. So install the Gutenberg plugin on your local. Install it on staging. You don't need to install it on production yet. But get testing with it. Get familiar with it. This is going to be part of the conversation when it comes to anything WordPress for the next three to five years, right? Use the resources available to you. There are tons and tons of themes and plugins and articles. There is so much emphasis on this. A lot of popular plugins like Gravity Forms, Yoast and others already have Gutenberg compatible interfaces, Gutenberg compatible custom blocks. TenUp has already developed a couple of custom plugins that work with Gutenberg. A lot of folks are really getting ahead of this. A ton of resources. A ton of really cool stuff that previously used to be a paid plugin or used to cost hundreds of hours of development that you can now do with a plugin because people are trying to get ahead of this feature of things. Go ahead and upgrade. Even if you don't want to use Gutenberg, go ahead and upgrade when the final product comes out. The Classic Editor is going to be available for at least a couple of years as a plugin. So you can just upgrade and install the Classic Editor and the admin will be very similar to what it was before. But always, always stay upgraded. You want to stay upgraded to get the latest and greatest from the software. And really like the biggest thing is just start building. It's really cool. It's very, very powerful. At TenUp I was already starting to build sites, little prototypes for pitching strategies with Gutenberg. It was a really, really cool way to very, very quickly prototype add-on experiences, prototype front-end kind of workflows for editorial. And it's something that anybody can do really, really quickly once you get the hang of the tool. And follow along. Because this project is coming out so hot, because it's such a big part of the future of WordPress, there's going to be a ton of really rapid iteration, a ton of really, really rapid innovation. So I have no doubt within the next six months there's going to be some people who are going to turn Gutenberg on its head and use really, really cool things because it's reactive, because it's more visual, because it's more modular. The sky's the limit as far as what we can do with this technology. So definitely follow along. Gutenberg Handbook is a good place to go to bone up on this. And I've got a bunch of links and resources coming up next. The Handbook's a good place. Make, Blog, Core, they're publishing a lot of updates on this. I grabbed that screenshot for the WordCamp site custom plugging just from the Make Blog. Published the post the other day. It was just like we're working on a custom walk for speakers. They posted a bunch of comps and envision links. So I went through there and looked at what they were doing. So it's really cool to go in and see what the leaders in this space are working on as far as custom walks. That's all there. So just a couple of special things. I want to thank Helen from TenUp, Martin Wiley who's here part of the Seattle community, all the organizers, the Gutenberg team, and I thought some ideas around Gutenberg would help contribute to Gutenberg development. I've got a list of resources here and the slides are available at bit.ly-gutenprez if you'd like to go grab the slides with all of these resources. I'm going to just let our volunteer here pick who goes when by shuffle on the microphone. Love it. Thank you so much. So I'm just curious to say the Gutenberg plugin is buggy. Is that buggy like you cannot tell us what the website cache is? Yeah, good question. Much more the former, right? It's much more it's not even you can't tell size of word. I hover over a column block and I can't quite get the edge of the column because I want to select it in an added setting. There's still some UI quirks. There have been a lot of little bugs too. Like when you tab from this one to this one it skips over that. All those little things just because it's so new and because of the rapid pace of development so it's much more of the small this would frustrate an end user and will probably frustrate you for a little bit until you get the hang of the type of bugs not when it crashes your site. Good clarification. And working with Divi, so how will their page builder interact with Gutenberg? Yeah, so page builders are kind of brushing to figure out that out. Beaver Builder published a big long post trying to find a 12 months ago saying we're working on it, we're trying to figure out how we coexist, how we do that. I think because the ultimate goal of Gutenberg is to make site and page building easier and more accessible I really do think more than ever these at least traditional what you think of as Divi and Beaver Builder are in more and more direct competition with one another particularly as the Gutenberg editor expands beyond the content so I think those page builder plugins are trying to figure out right now what do we bring that WordPress core that the block based editor on page building aren't going to do because that's always been their thing WordPress stops here and we're going to pick it up and go forward WordPress is pushing further into that market so it's going to be interesting to see where they land for you specifically I think it'll be can you achieve all of the things that you're achieving right now with Divi in the new block based editor and if so think about how you move and update into that or stay with what you've got but I'd be reading their blog, I'd be painting them with what are your guys' plans what are you looking at, what's your roadmap a lot of them may just continue to say that's fine they're moving into our space we think we do it better, we have a product we have a loyal customer base and we want people to continue to use our product instead of the block based editor not as an add on from a lot of folks I haven't seen a definitive this is how we're going to approach Gutenberg and how we're going to work in that environment but it was a few months ago when I checked in the blog how is Gutenberg going to affect the themes that would be used if you're using something that's been customized is perhaps older are they going to get automatically updated or what yeah it depends on your theme offer and how ahead of the time they are a lot of themes will publish updates and say we're now Gutenberg compatible which simply means they're going to write styles that work with all of the default WordPress Gutenberg blocks the cool thing is that a theme doesn't necessarily have to be compatible that certainly allows you to leverage all of the different types of blocks that there are there's full width blocks there's covered image blocks that there's not like Gutenberg ships with a bunch of styles that will try and do it pretty well for you so just because a theme isn't saying Gutenberg compatible doesn't necessarily mean that Gutenberg won't work fairly well for you but because it's restricted to the post content area if you've customized a lot of other parts of your theme Gutenberg, you know, Gutenberg's not going to mess with your header, not going to mess with your flutter, not going to mess with your sidebar it's restricted to that content area so it's going to be if I were you I'd take a staging site or a local development environment and I'd activate Gutenberg and I'd write out a post and use a bunch of blocks and see how it looks, right use the cover image block, use the full width image block and my hunch is it'll look pretty good, right there might be a little bit of like, well the full width alignment doesn't actually go full width because my theme has a couple of main wrappers around it and it doesn't allow it to go full width and so you'll need to decide at that point is it worth going to a local theme bugging the theme author to update and go ahead and allow you to do things like that so yeah, I think Matt in the talk last weekend at work camp he said he's hoping that with all of the kind of churn that's been around the rushed push of 5.0 and Gutenberg he's hoping it's the most anti-climactic major release ever because people will go, oh my gosh, we'll get updated and they'll be like, oh, okay it's just block based now, the content shows up in the content and the rest of my theme looks great, okay I think for most people on your how to prepare page this question related to that I recently, like in the last three or four days, got a note from Woo telling me that before I update to WordPress 5.0 I need to absolutely make sure I update WooCommerce to 3.5.1 so my question is for you and anybody else in the room today, have you updated to WooCommerce 3.5.1 yet I've never gotten a note from them before so it'll learn to be a little bit and B, have you found any problems in doing so? Gotcha I think that's probably a good hallway discussion I have not done it so I don't have any insights for you but if others have updated Woo, we got Meryl in purple, she's a WooCom expert thank you Meryl but yeah, you guys should meet up and talk about WooCom my hunch is that they are bringing a lot of new Meryl, can you raise your hand again? Everybody talk to Meryl my hunch is that they are releasing a bunch of custom blocks and a bunch of custom styles that will allow you to really take advantage of the WordPress architecture and they really want you to update so that you get all of that goodness but that's Meryl does it do that? It will impact the HTML yeah so moving for blocks, output as good old HTML a lot of the things that you do in the blocks, output, inline styles so in my example where I color coded that paragraph, that would output inline styles to add those styles to that paragraph so it will impact the HTML but it's the HTML within the content area of your post so you don't have to worry about it impacting other areas of your site you were mentioning the spacer blocks triggered this, do you know if those are a point yet where it allows responsiveness controls quickly? I don't think so yeah, I think you have to write media queries yeah, I think it's pixel based so those sort of updates will be coming and you can always write that custom spacer block, you can take that block and add it on to an extended I know a lot of what they're adding in some of the final beta releases and I'm sure we'll add it on future releases it's extensibility to the default core blocks that ship with Gutenberg and you can always spin up your own custom block and create a spacer where it allows my question is about coexistence so first can you have can you edit some pages using Gutenberg and have other pages that are with the classic editor and number two since I think there's about 100 gazillion websites out there can you repeat again or are you sure that the classic editor will not ship, you have to manually install a plugin correct, so first question is remind me, first question is can some pages right, so I do not think that's going to ship in 5.0 and Matt specifically talked about that last week if they'd like to be able to add a core feature where you can turn it on or off by the author so you're a user and you log in and you want Gutenberg, you can write with Gutenberg somebody else from your team or who owns the site can log in and use just the classic so my hunch is that the ability to do that is there but it's not going to be a core feature either have it turned on or turned off anybody give it a chime in if there's if they know differently and then second was the plug installation of the plugin not shipping with the yes, you have to install a plugin yeah, if you update to 5.0 you're automatically going to get Gutenberg my hunch is I don't want to speculate whether they'll have a prompt or not to say my hunch is they'll have a prompt say don't like this, click here and install this plugin and you'll be fine but there is one canonical classic editor plugin and they said they're guaranteeing support through 2021 so the classic editor will be there in a while sorry and the automatic update that will automatically take you to 5.0 if you have automatic updates turned on I'm not sure if automatic updates do major releases or if they just do minor releases so we'll do major it's a major 5.0 release so if automatic updates don't do majors then you talked about the blocks API and page template and post type templates is that something that's shipping with 5.0 or is that a coming, that's going to be there all the documentation is there it's awesome, just WordPress.org WAC, Gutenberg, WAC handbook and all the block API documentation there is really great learning react because this editor is built in React I am not a React expert at all I'm not a JavaScript expert at all I spent a few weeks studying React online and after that I could read the block API just fine, it's really really cool there's a couple of starter block templates out there too and I had my own custom block up and running in 15 or 20 minutes now I came with a couple of weeks worth of studying React and learning what I was looking at in JavaScript but it's becoming more and more and more accessible and they're doing a really good job of documentation so yeah, the handbook is a great place to start so maybe I didn't fully understand what you just said because my question was am I still going to be able to look at the code behind the block so is there still a tech spot where I can look at the code and see what it's doing? certain blocks, yes so paragraph block there's a raw HTML block those blocks you can there's a little toggle and drop down and say do you want to edit this HTML and then if you edit HTML it says do you want to edit this HTML block or custom blocks, right? if I build a net like that custom speaker block they're not going to expose the HTML to you because there's mostly JavaScript going on there the HTML is not even there until it's compiled so one of the concerns that came up a lot in the development community was what's this going to do to my custom post types or other things like that and it sounds like there's been a huge amount of progress getting metabox and all the other metaboxes and all the other things working I just discovered a plugin called Gutenberg RAM R-A-M-P and all it does is it lets you decide for this custom post type or this post type do I want to use Gutenberg or not and that's for people who are concerned about that that's a nice tool it doesn't seem high impact that's a core part of the API so you can in functions.php turn Gutenberg on in different places in your site and my post type so I think that plugin is just making it easier for non-code and for people who are concerned about not installing a classic editor isn't there a custom isn't there a classic block as well so I don't know if it actually allows you to select a classic block so if I wrote a page in the classic editor it won't automatically turn that chunk of text from my classic editor into a paragraph block it will keep it as a hey you wrote this in classic mode do you want to go ahead and upgrade this to blocks or no and you can decide to leave it I don't know last time I looked at the UI I didn't see a classic block that I could go and proactively create a new classic block in but it keeps your content in the classic block if you upgrade it with re-design re-design with the website and that's one of the questions I've been throwing out there is are we going to be looking at more Gutenberg based type things or are we just going to try to stick to the classic editor and it sounds like 5.0 in a forced Gutenberg so would you recommend then going that route looking at Gutenberg themes now rather than trying to take it all out later yeah I would with a number of caveats if a customer were to ask me that I would because it's the future of WordPress you might as well get ahead of that train versus being behind it but there are a lot of caveats the accessibility is getting there but it's not there yet so if that's a major requirement from your team I would take a look at that and understand how comfortable you are there I would test it and use the UI if the team likes the UI and it works with what you want to do but if I had to just black and white answer yes or no I would definitely lean towards the let's go ahead and get ahead of this it's powerful, it's forward looking there's a lot of benefits to it and while there are a few drawbacks they're not enough for me to stare at you and how does it really work with the content migration from a classic to a Gutenberg if you're going to a whole new site to a whole new site so if you turn it on on a site and we have a bunch of content written in classic it'll show hey this content was written in classic do you want to upgrade this to blocks and if you say yes, let's say you have a 5 paragraph about page it'll just turn it into 5 paragraph blocks for you so pretty seamless a couple up here I think go ahead I can repeat the question so do the columns are they going to be responsive yes the question is are the column block and the gallery block going to be responsive so last time I used the column block it was not responsive it didn't shift with those front end styles and I think the reason why is they want they want you to go ahead and fit it into the responsive grid they don't want to make any assumptions around where your content is going to break so you have to write the break points and the responsiveness for those columns galleries might actually because you can select for galleries how many columns I'd have to double check there but there's they Gutenberg tries to balance that line let's make this look great for you but let's not make too many assumptions and shove a bunch of CSS that you may or may not like into your front end there will be some things that the theme will have to take care of so yeah Gutenberg compatible themes should shift with all of the styles to make all of those default blocks work if you're building a theme from scratch part of the testing process will be activating all the blocks and writing styles to make sure columns, right? 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 the columns use flexbox so they're pretty great two questions one with you giving us the link for the slides is that because these are more current slides than what are on the word camp site and then 2 can you detail more what you mean about accessibility my team also is about ready to do a major upgrade and I work for WSU and our site has to be accessible yeah so there's been a lot of community discussion over the last couple of months around the accessibility of the block based editor itself so we're talking about the admin not the front end the front end is still the themes responsibility to make sure the markup of the output and all the styles and everything are accessible it's specifically around the accessibility of the block based editor itself is React used always to render the blocks or just as a preview in the editor I'm wondering about server side rendering and SEO yeah so not an expert but I believe React is used to render the blocks and it's the same the cool thing about Junberg is that it's the same that you're getting on the back end is what you're getting on the front end so you're getting the same output but yeah React is used Any more questions? Great questions you guys, thank you Thanks for coming