From the course: First Look: WordPress Full-Site Editing

Gutenberg and WordPress - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: First Look: WordPress Full-Site Editing

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Gutenberg and WordPress

- Let's take a quick walk down memory lane. The first release of WordPress was in 2003. It started as simple blogging software and has since matured into a full-fledge content management system. Since the beginning, the WordPress Editor is where the magic happened. It's where you create and publish content for your site. From there, the appearance of the site is generally left to themes, while things that extend poor functionality are left up to plugins. So the editor, themes and plugins work together to form this trifecta of the WordPress experience. The WordPress Editor was originally built on a rich text editor called TinyMCE. The content creation experience was similar to what you might experience with a word processor. Even as WordPress grew in capability and popularity over the years, the Editor, now known as the Classic Editor, remain largely unchanged. In December 2018, with the release of version 5.0, WordPress introduced a new editing experience, code named Gutenberg. The new block-based editor fundamentally changed how we author content in WordPress. A variety of block types, take paragraphs, headings, images, quotes, et cetera, are used to used to create rich content. The block editor wasn't quite ready for prime time when it was released, but it has since matured into a robust editing experience that makes it relatively simple to create complex content layouts without code. Feature development continues to happen in the Gutenberg plugin. When features are ready, they're rolled into WordPress Core. A lot of development has been done in Gutenberg to support something called Full Site Editing. What's that you might ask? Well imagine a site where the block editor is used for all aspects of a site. Not just the content area. Headers, footers, and side bars alike, can be formatted and populated with blocks. That's what Full Site Editing is in a nutshell. And each major release of WordPress inches us closer and closer to this new way of building sites. What does it mean then for WordPress themes if blocks can be used to lay out areas that have traditionally been the domain of themes? And should plugins still be using short codes and widgets if blocks are the new standard? Full Site Editing would be a major rethink of building sites with WordPress. But, there's no need to panic. Two years after the introduction of the Block Editor and there is still more than five million activations of the Classic Editor plugin running on sites. That means there are a lot of people out there who haven't even adopted the Block Editor for content yet. It would be sometime, probably several years at least before we see widespread adoption of Full Site Editing. At the time I'm recording this course, Full Site Editing is far from feature complete. So consider this first look as an introduction to the concepts in a way for you to get ready for Full site Editing when it does land.

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