 Hope you're all having fun, so far so good? Yeah, yeah. Cool, cool. I have to, you know, applaud you for sitting in this room for whatever, three hours now. Good job. Hope you got some snacks and things like that. This is a long, long day, but it can be very, very overwhelming for sure. So that's why there's lots of time this afternoon to just kind of decompress a little bit. And also, it's always great to be working on your site if everybody's got desktop server set up locally and be testing that out. That's a good thing to do. How many of you, in your local site that you set up earlier this morning, how many of you have already installed Gutenberg on that site? All right, all right. About exactly half, which is about as many people as like it, too. Which is, you know, it's not here or there. It's one of those things that's like, I like it, but you don't have to like it. At the end of the day, it is going to be eventually not called Gutenberg at all, it's just going to be called WordPress. It's just, it is, it's going to be there. Anyway, but what we're here to talk about today is just kind of giving you a big head start since you are just getting into WordPress in general or just starting to build your first site and things like that. Why don't you all go ahead and get familiar with Gutenberg right away as well because it is a very different writing experience. Whether that's good or bad for you, I don't know, but it's very different and it is going to be the norm going forward. So let's get oriented around what that means exactly. So what? Essentially it's a new block-based editor. A lot of people have said it's WordPress's answer to the medium editor. How many of you have ever written a blog post in medium? Medium.com. Couple, okay, so that analogy doesn't matter. Essentially instead of writing paragraphs and dropping in images, you drop in a block and that block can do lots of different things, can go in lots of different areas and can hold lots of different types of content. So instead of thinking of your blog article as like an essay or like a Google doc, you really can't think of it more as a more media-rich content experience. That's the idea. Maybe there's another, a better analogy. How many of you have ever read any of those like really long, image-heavy articles on the New York Times? Like really rich articles that are full of content that it'll take you like 40 minutes to read them? Yeah, that kind of article, you can't do that in the current WordPress editor. It just really doesn't work. You can't make that happen. At least not easily. When people want to create that kind of a dramatic, really impactful experience on their articles, they turn to different tools. They're not gonna use that default, what's called tiny MCE editor. That's what that current editor is called. A block-based editor does allow for more dynamic layouts. That's the idea. But only if you could figure out how those blocks work. How can I add blocks? How can I move blocks? How can I put different content into blocks? That's the only way it's gonna work. And that's some of the controversy around Gutenberg is a bunch of people look at it and say, I don't know what to do. And it doesn't make sense to me. Well, it'll take some time for everybody. So where is Gutenberg? Well, currently it's a plugin. And if you are keeping your WordPress website updated, you would have seen a gigantic notice that says, oh my gosh, holy crap, we're doing a new thing. This is where you can get it right now. They make it really, really big and obvious where you can get it. But right now it's just like any other plugin that we talked about earlier in the earlier presentation that you can install from WordPress.org. Go to add new plugins and search Gutenberg. Actually, you really don't even have to do that. Once you get to add new plugins, it's actually one of the featured plugins right now. So it's just sitting right there ready for you to install and activate. And if you have not yet activated it on your local site, now's a good time to do that. It's free and it's there. Eventually though, it's not gonna be a plugin. It's going to just be WordPress. When you install WordPress or when you update essentially from 4.9.9 is coming out in about three weeks. When you update from 4.9.9 to 5.0, that's the idea, then it's gonna be WordPress. It's just gonna be the default writing experience. When is that going to happen? Well, I'm not a future teller, I don't know. I mean, it's supposed to happen soon. It's supposed to happen sometime soon. As any good product developer, Matt Mullenweg is leading this effort and he says it'll happen when it's ready. That's the answer, it'll happen when it's ready. But there's a lot of pressure around it. I'm pretty sure it's gonna happen before December. There's a big event happening and Matt does not wanna show up to WordCamp US without his product, so. Pretty sure, we'll see what happens. Why, but all of this, like why? Why are we even doing it? Why does it even matter? Well, it's kind of essentially what I was saying earlier about those big, media-rich content experiences. You can't really do that with the current editor. Plus, if you have played with WordPress websites already and have built anything at all, most likely you've interacted with some sort of page builder on one way or another. Maybe it's Elementor, maybe it's Beaver Builder. There's lots of them out there. Maybe Visual Composer, I'm so sorry, but maybe any of those could have been the thing that you used. And one thing that Matt Mullenweg has said is the why is those tools give more power to WordPress. Why should it be limited to only hundreds of thousands of users when WordPress itself powers tens of millions of users? Shouldn't those tens of millions of users, I need to plug my laptop in, forgot that part, shouldn't those tens of millions of users be able to benefit from a more feature-rich content experience as well? That's a pretty compelling why, I think, at the end of the day. As long as that new experience actually is stable and reliable and functional and people know how to use it, essentially. So that's kind of the big, broader picture. Yeah, I'll take a couple of questions real quick. You won't have to, but actually they worked really closely with popular page builders, especially Elementor and Beaver Builder, to make sure that there are essentially things called hooks in place so that you will have the choice. And you will be able to say, I want this page to be a Beaver Builder page. I want this other page to be a Gutenberg page. I want all my pages to be Beaver Builder pages, whatever. But that does depend on Beaver Builder and Elementor making sure that they leverage those hooks. They're there and available, they just need to develop that part which I believe they already have. That's a good question. Other quick questions about the broader, what, when, where, why? Cool, all right, moving on. So what is going to happen? You have a bunch of blog articles on your site already. What's going to happen when you install Gutenberg or when you update to 5.0 and Gutenberg is WordPress. What's going to happen? Well, something like this. Here's like a really simple site. This is what it looks like before and then you activate Gutenberg and there you go. Done, done. Okay, this seems like a big over promise but really essentially, here we go, watch again. That, boom, there we go. Essentially that's really the idea and I'll just go a little bit technical and explain why. All of your content is hosted in your database in a place called WP content. It's one specific spot in your database. Every single post has content held in one specific spot and Gutenberg does not change that content in any way. It doesn't, it uses it. It's going to use the exact same thing. It's, so once you activate Gutenberg, it doesn't change anything that's happening on that post at all and we're going to look at that in a little bit more detail in just a little bit. Now on the backend, when you log into your site and you want to edit a post, that experience does look very different. So let's take a look at that real quick. From the backend, this is kind of an example post of a nonprofit that I help out with. This is what their Support Us page looks like currently and this is what it looks like on Gutenberg. You can see that essentially they really pushed hard. Matt Mullerwig has always been a big fan of what's called distraction free mode. He's always really loved that a lot and I think this was his opportunity to make everything distraction free mode. And so you could see it's very minimalist and I think that's where some of the criticism comes from is sometimes it's so minimalist that you don't know where the controls are and that can be frustrating for sure. But there are controls and there are ways to make things happen. So, but once you switch over to Gutenberg, how it looks like on the backend, once you go to that post, that does look dramatically very different for sure and that's on purpose. Cool. So what should I know about creating new content? Well, there's really no way for me to really say what you should expect and how new content works. The only way to really do that is, ah, live demo. Live demos are terrible. Like they always go wrong. Like my wife is gonna text and you're gonna see all my stuff, I don't know. But it's really the only way to really make this happen is a live demo. So let's do it. And bear with me, I do a lot of different things in this experimental site. We've been doing this morning, we've been building out this site for peddling pedals, right? Is everybody ready to run a petal shop, a flower shop? This is, there's just some normal content in a standard post, right? We have our controls, it's familiar, it's comfortable. We know where everything is and the experience is pretty straightforward. You have your media library where you can add images and whatnot. And here, I'm gonna drop in real quick all of our nice flower images as long as the wifi holds up to it. Oh, I missed one. Just as a refresher, this is kind of essentially what we do with normal WordPress posts. Oh, this is gonna take way too long. We'll do one at a time. Oh, that's gonna go forever. Oh no, here we go, cool. That'll actually run in the background too. So that's pretty standard straight experience. And then, like I said, we can take that same post. This is what it looks like on the front end. I have a really minimalist site. I'm sorry it's not the same exact theme as what you were using earlier, but it's super minimalist here. And down here, we're gonna change that. I'm gonna clone it. And because I have Gutenberg installed already, the default edit button actually will go to Gutenberg. Now, if you haven't heard already, as they're launching Gutenberg, they're also launching a thing called the Classic Editor. If you don't want to deal with Gutenberg, there is the ability to install a plugin called Classic Editor, and that will just preserve the normal content, right, an experience that you've always known. You can do that. And what happens is you'll see it right there, Classic Editor. But the default is gonna be Gutenberg. So this is that same exact page, and we're gonna click Edit. And it's gonna take us to that page, but in Gutenberg. This is the first thing that you should expect. Is that all of your content, like I said, it's still there. But it all exists essentially in one big block. You see that? And this is called the Classic Block. This is essentially like having the Classic Editor in Gutenberg. That's the idea. When you click into it, you'll actually be able to see that the controls are those old, familiar controls that we all know and love, right? And we can edit things just like normal. But I'm here to play with Gutenberg. So what should I do? Well, they actually have this great tool that works pretty well overall. You click on the little menu in the top right there, those three dots, and you can see where it says Convert to Blocks. Now, I have not actually done, this is like a magician, right? I haven't met you before, right? I haven't actually done this with this content yet, so I don't know what's going to happen. I promise. I know what's supposed to happen. We'll find out what happens. Convert to Blocks. Ah, see? Yeah. That went really badly. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. Exactly. That went really badly. Let me see what happened. Hold on. There's a great way you can look at the code editor. Live demo, right? Live demo. Oh, basically it just misidentified the type of content each of this was. It tried to make it into a gist block. That's a, that's not fun. Cool. Well. Yeah, let's undo that crap. Let's go back. We'll switch back to visual mode. Nice. And then we're gonna be patient with you Gutenberg. All right. Be nice to us. There we go. The main idea here is essentially, you should be able to have lots of controls to be able to do lots of different layout things, but you should also be able to just type and be able to make stuff nice, all right? So you see right there, I was at the title up here and all I did was hit enter. And what that does is I just created a new block and you didn't even know it. It's really very, it's not even, you can't even see anything that's going on there. But that right there where the cursor is blinking, that's already a block. When I hover over it, now you start to see those block controls show up. And it thinks I used a lot of just blocks all of a sudden. So it's recommending that, I don't want just blocks anymore. So I'm gonna paste that content in here. Oh, it just, it pastes, it pastes as just blocks. I'm gonna write my own damn content. Leave me alone. We're an awesome. Yeah, I've been playing with that recently myself because they're hyping that up a lot too. And it is, it's very streamlined. I actually like the Drop Boss box paper experience better than Google Docs in some ways. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it's really nice. We're an awesome flower shop, all right? And we have awesome flowers. Okay, so each time I hit enter, I'm creating a new block. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit more. Is that better? I'm also gonna get rid of these guys. One thing you can do here is some people prefer like having the controls right on the block themselves, but there's also the ability to do what they call the unified toolbar. And that essentially means that the toolbar is always gonna stick at the very top of the screen. So anytime you're on any block, that toolbar will change according to whatever block it is and instead of having those controls directly on the block. So right here, those controls are here directly on the block, but I can change it to the unified toolbar, and now those controls are up here. So I'm on this one, and I can come up here and remove block. Personally, that's a little bit far away from the action for me. So I actually really prefer the spotlight mode. No, the other mode. Yes. Yes, you can. So we're gonna do this one and this one, and we're gonna remove both of them. Nice. So I have my simple little sentences. Like I said, it's one real quick thing, and then I'll get to you. Another, like I was saying, you should be able to just keep typing. And if you want to do, for example, heading, you don't have to get away from the keyboard. You can do slash commands is what they're called. As soon as I type in forward slash, it's gonna bring up a bunch of suggestions. And from there, I can go and choose heading, and now it's a heading. And when I hit enter, I'm back down to a normal paragraph. I can do the same thing with an image. That's an image block, and I can pick from the media library. Hopefully some of my flower images are finally there. Oh, look at them, they look great. This one. You'll put that in there. But what I really want actually is a gallery. So I'm gonna do gallery, media library. Three, let's do four. Yep, I'm not gonna do captions for now. That's kind of the default layout for a four image gallery. But you can adjust it over here in the block section. These are the block details. Normally any kind of block that you're gonna have is gonna have also a detail section. So we're gonna change this from three columns to two to one. So now with one, of course, it's just a big long list of images. With two, it naturally goes to four, like a square with three. It's only four images, so of course, you have three at the top and one at the bottom. Does that make sense? Let me come back to that question that I missed earlier, right here. Oh, actually never mind what you figured out. Awesome. I totally wanna mangle that, I'm sure. Great. There's a lot going on here. We could do a lot more things with the content. One thing that I always have loved about even the current editor is their support for O embed. If you don't know what that is, you probably have experienced it one way or another. Have you ever pasted a YouTube link into the editor and then that video shows up right there? Have you ever done that? That's a great feature and that works here as well. And you just paste it in and there it is, you're done. I really like the gallery feature a lot. Another thing that is unique to WordPress, to Gutenberg, is its support for what's called a line wide and full width. This we're gonna talk about in just a second, but a line wide is basically taking whatever block that is and breaking it out of your normal content width. So maybe you have a content width that's like a column like this, that gallery is gonna bust out just a little bit. But the full width, it's kind of hard to see since I'm zoomed in here, but see the full width goes all the way to the edges. And you could do that with a normal image. They have a great feature here called cover image, which essentially does an image full width across the whole thing. And then you could put a title right on top of that image and make that image dark. It's a nice, let me just show that super quick. We don't have a ton of time, but Roy will let me do whatever I want, right, Roy? Not everybody will though, so that's the problem. Let's take the puffins. Let's go full width. I heart puffins, right? So that's a nice cover image idea that you could put anywhere throughout your post. It's a nice way to differentiate between different segments of your content. So there's a lot going on there. There's a lot more to talk about in general. I'm happy to answer your questions about that later, but let me get to a couple last things. Theme support, this is the next big issue. A lot of that align wide and that full width, that depends completely on whether or not your theme supports it. So Gutenberg has done a couple of things to ensure that nothing's gonna get messed up if your theme doesn't support it. But if they don't support it, you're not gonna see those options at all. If they do support it, then you're gonna see those options available and you should be able to expect that it will be there. I saw a question right there. Yes. Yep, yep. That theme is called co-blocks. And I'm gonna mention them in just a little bit. Gutenberg does do a lot of layout styles out of the box, actually, but your theme is gonna wanna leverage them a lot. So be watching over the next months for major theme updates. You're gonna wanna make those updates if you plan to use Gutenberg. And if you find that you have a theme that you're using all the time that you love and you just don't see anything coming, ask them what they're planning to do with Gutenberg. And if they say nothing, maybe start thinking about finding a new theme. So keep that in mind. Now, when it comes to plugin support, of course, are you gonna be able to use your favorite plugins? Well, maybe, I don't know, it's complicated. That plugins are a whole nother beast and a lot of times they are supposed to interact directly with your content or they're supposed to be in your content. And so it's up to them to update and to be compatible with Gutenberg. The good thing, nine times out of 10, if they're gonna be in your content, they're gonna provide you with a short code. And short codes work in Gutenberg, no problem. So most of the time, you're gonna be fine even if they don't bring out a new update or if they don't say, hey, big update with Gutenberg compatibility. They might not say that, but you're still gonna have your short codes and you're still gonna be able to use them. But if they do say, oh, hey, big update, it's Gutenberg compatibility, what that most likely means is they created some new Gutenberg blocks that you'll be able to use and you'll be able to choose that block. Like maybe you have a gallery plugin that you really like and that is gonna have its own separate gallery block separate from the core one. That's in Gutenberg already. There's lots of momentum for plugins supporting Gutenberg. Our plugin, I work at Giv, already has blocks all set up. Yoast is the most complicated because Yoast deals a lot with your meta information and they actually worked really, really closely with the Gutenberg team to make sure that they can have their own custom sidebar. Yoast has a new custom cyber. They just launched and released this just a few weeks ago. But it is done a great job integrating with Gutenberg. Gravity Forms has its blocks now as well. Like I said, short codes were still work and there's a new wave of new plugins coming out too. Two that I really like in particular, one is called Atomic Blocks. The other one is called Co-Blocks and that theme I was using is from Co-Blocks and Co-Blocks has its own set of custom blocks as well. Yes. No, you're gonna create your Giv form like you always do but you're gonna be able to insert that with a block into the Gutenberg content. Down the road, we're gonna look into being able to make adjustments to the form. There's some minor adjustments that you can do of the Giv form in that sidebar but they're like show or don't show the title and a lot of... Say it again. It's technically already there. We just have hidden it for now. So yeah, good question. Anytime you ask about me and my work, I'm happy. So that's all I got. My name is Matt Cromwell. I'm Head of Support at GivWP and Word Impress and I'll take some more questions. Yeah, just a question. I was starting a new, relatively new to Wordpress and I was starting a new site the other day so I thought I'd use Gutenberg. I was trying to modify an existing page that came with it so I would do it and save it and then I had another window with a live setup. I wasn't saving any of the changes and then I just switched back to the classic editor I would edit and save it and it worked fine. I mean, are there still kind of bugs in it or? Yes, there are for sure. I still find them. It's a moving target right now. That's why a lot of folks... There is a lot of people. I have it live on my personal website. If you go to mattcromwell.com, you'll see I'm using it there. The previous presentation was about plugins and their reliability. Most often, not always, most often it's maybe because of a theme incompatibility or a plugin incompatibility but it's more likely than normal that it could just be like a glitch with Gutenberg specifically or that Gutenberg hasn't yet created a way to prevent that problem from happening. In development, especially in a WordPress world where there is an infinite number of combinations of plugins and themes that could be interacting with Gutenberg at any one time, it's extremely challenging to develop in a way that doesn't create breakage in one way or another. That's not an excuse, it's just a reality. But WordPress is known for its stability and so they're not gonna put it in 5.0 what they say, they're not gonna put it in 5.0 until it's stable, stable. As stable as what you've always expected from WordPress core. Good question. Any other questions? Great, I'm around this afternoon. I'm also speaking tomorrow on supporting free themes and plugins if you're into that at all. So I'm happy to answer questions at any other time as well. Thanks so much.