The new Gutenberg editor will be the default soon in WordPress. The Classic Editor will be available as a plugin. However Gutenberg is way better, more powerful and intuitive. I’ve been using it for months. It does mean change. Some things may break. That’s the price of doing a massive updates, not just incremental changes. There is some gnashing of teeth now.
A few examples of why Gutenberg is better:
Everything is a block. Images, paragraphs, quotes, video embeds. Blocks are easily editable and moved. Plugins like Atomic Block and Caxton are already adding functionality to the default blocks.
Upload images directly into posts.
Cut and paste from Word, Google Docs, and many more formats directly into a WordPress post and Gutenberg handles the conversion, turning everything into blocks.
Woo Commerce, which is owned by WordPress, is now using WordPress components.
Once the Gutenberg editor is officially released, WordPress will then put Gutenberg functionality into the core code for themes and plugins. This means some themes and plugins, especially older ones that haven’t been updated in a while, may have issues or even break.
Prepare now for Gutenberg. Contact me if you want to know more.