Gutenberg may be released as early as August, at which point WordPress will go through a radical, not evolutionary change. The first thing to change will be the editor. After that, themes and plugins.
The Gutenberg editor uses blocks to do everything. Blocks are reusable pieces of code. Developers will need to use blocks when writing add-ons and plugins for the editor. Users will be able to create their own blocks, which essentially are predefined templates to do whatever they want. Have one block for book reviews and another for long-form blog posts. Plus blocks can be shared and nested. This powerful stuff.
Gutenberg will put the WordPress editor way ahead of the competition. The Gutenberg editor is flexible, easy to use, and powerful. And, oh yeah, it’s going to break things. The WordPress core is already being updated. I’m seeing old plugins that were reliable, like BackWPup, start to have problems when updated. This is because something in the WordPress core changed and the plugin, for whatever reason, can no longer handle it. And Gutenberg hasn’t been released yet! What we are seeing now is just the leading edge. So, get your site Gutenberg-ready now. Don’t wait. Contact me, I can help.
Gutenberg schedule:
For the rest of June, the development team will work on the few issues and features that are identified to land in the first core version.
In July more users will be able to use Gutenberg on wordpress.com as well as on self-hosted WordPress sites via a Try Gutenberg prompt in a future 4.9.x version.
In August, the team will work on bug fixes and the merge proposal to land in WordPress Core. Mullenweg said that after one hundred thousand users and two hundred fifty thousand blog posts, Gutenberg could be ready to be released with WordPress 5.0 as soon as August.
Quoting from Matt Mullenweg’s keynote at WordCamp Europe about Gutenberg.
The major features that are in effect so far are we have a block based writing experience, with over 20 blocks built in. Gutenberg is fully adaptive, meaning that whether you’re looking at it on a small screen, a medium screen, a large screen, a huge screen, the design and the functionality adapts to be fluid and easy to use on any of those.
This is one of my favorite, the universal API, which is copy and paste. Who’s ever tried to copy and paste things into the WordPress editor, or anyplace else, and it just goes kind of sideways?
Gutenberg already has support for fully supported copy and paste from Google Docs, a Apple’s Pages, everyone’s favorite Microsoft Word, Office 365, Evernote, Legacy WordPress, random webpages, and then finally something that I know will be very popular with this audience is Markdown.
I’ll tell you about my other favorite hidden feature. Which is that when you copy and paste the URL onto some text, it auto links it. Saves a ton of time.