Gutenberg, Block Editor and WordPress Roadmap

Last updated March 14, 2021

Full-Site Editing Go/NoGo decision for 5.8

Now that WordPress 5.7 is released since March 9th, 2021, the core team is planning 5.8 and putting the next release team together.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy published two posts with additional information.

• Full-site editing pre-merge overview an updated time line of decision-making on the prototype/MVP and communication roll-out for the merge of Full-Site Editing (FSE) into the core software.
• In a follow-up post, Josepha shared the core team’s early thoughts on 5.8 Planning and elaborated on the changes, depending on if FSE will be merged or not in assembling the release team.

The team will decide on April 13 or 27, if a successful merge can be achieved for the 5.8 release in July (Yes, it was moved a month) or if it will be pushed to 5.9 in December 2021.

Big Picture Goals 2021

Josepha Haden set the goal posts for the WordPress projects for 2021

• Timeline for Full Site Editing:
  • MVP in the plugin by April 2021
  • v1 in Core by WordPress 5.8.
• Learn.WordPress
  • regularly publish new workshops and lesson plans,
  • maintain a high pass rate on workshop quizzes to establish learner success and comprehension.
  • Block Editor related Workshops
• Contributor tools decrease the manual overhead of maintenance work for teams through better tooling. 

Read the full post here

Follow along with these resources:

• WordPress 5.7 Development Cycle
  WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 is scheduled for February 2nd, 2021.
• Keeping up with Gutenberg Index
  if you missed a week or month with updates from team you can always go back
• Weekend Edition of the Gutenberg Times Archive
• Gutenberg Changelog Podcast, every other week.
  

The Weekend Edition via Email

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State of the Word 2020

December 17, 2020, Matt Mullenweg gave his State of the Word talk with an extensive Q & A afterwards with him and other team members.

• 26 minutes keynote
• Questions and Answer session
• Site Editor coming to WordPress

WordPress 5.7 – March 2021

WordPress 5.7 planning has already begun.

• WordPress 5.7 Development Cycle
• Francesca Marano posted WordPress 5.7: What’s on your wishlist? to collect input from the WordPress Community.
• JB Audras posted a Call for Volunteers – Early bug scrubs for WordPress 5.7

Block Editor in 2021 – Full-Site Editing and Global Styles

Matias Ventura posted a Status Check: Site Editing and Customization. In this post, Ventura summarizes the current status of Gutenberg’s Phase 2 Projects: Site Editor, Block-based Themes, Navigation Block, Query Block, and Global Styles.

He ends with: “In terms of timelines, all of these are in advanced stages and can be used in the Gutenberg plugin already. The main hurdle to include the work in major WordPress releases are the various dependencies between each project when it comes to ensuring a great user experience. The immediate focus is then on completing the milestones, stabilizing the work, and doing as much testing with different kinds of users as possible. For that last purpose, there will be some calls for testing announced soon as part of the Site Editing Outreach Program.”

🔖 Bookmark “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index” 
The WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development Phase 2 are listed on one page: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS from June to December 2020

WordPress 5.6 – December 2020

WordPress 5.6 “Simone”

• WordPress 5.6: Core Editor Overview
• WordPress 5.6 Field Guide

Update May 13, 2020: Josepha Haden posted

• Update: Progress on Goals
• WordPress 5.5 Planning Roundup

WP5.5 – August Release

• Feature Plugin: Automatic updates functionality for major WordPress Core releases (opt-in).
• Complete: Convert the widgets-editing areas complete.
• Complete: Functionality for full site editing complete behind experimental flag in the plugin.
• Complete: Global styles behind experimental flag in the plugin.
• Ship: Update WordPress Core to include current releases of the Gutenberg plugin.
• Ship: Navigation menus block in Core.
• Ship: Automatic updates for plugins and themes in Core.
• Ship: Block directory in Core.
• Ship: XML Sitemaps 
• Ship: Lazy Loading 

Quoted from Josepha’s post, these are planned items.

“Current release of Gutenberg plugin”, means the current version at time of 5.5 Beta 1, which is planned for July 7, 2020. It probably will be Gutenberg 8.5 or 8.6. Final release of 5.5 is scheduled for August 11, 2020.

Design & Dev Updates in May 2020

• What’s next in Gutenberg? (May) by Riad Benguella
• Gutenberg Phase 2 Friday Design Update #52
• Gutenberg Phase 2 Friday Design Update #51

Matt Mullenweg at WPBlockTalk

Matt Mullenweg open the April 2, 2020, WPBlockTalk conference with an updated Gutenberg Roadmap and what’s next in Gutenberg and Matias showed off the Full-site Editing experience.

Design updates Gutenberg Phase 2
Jan – April 2020

Update on nine focus projects

In December 2019, Josepha Haden, executive direct of the open-source projects published an update on the nine focus projects.

The migration of the widgets to blocks and the merge of the Site Health project into core were shipped in 5.3.

For the work in progress, Josepha also added the targeted versions, when we can expect them in core.

• Navigation Block to build menus (5.5)
• Block Directory for discovery and installation single block plugins from the Block Inserter (5.5)
• Automating update opt-in for plugins and themes (5.5)
• Themes registering content areas for block editor (5.6)
• Widget areas and Customizer are able to use blocks (5.6)
• Automatic update of major core releases (5.6)

The WordPress Core Roadmap page shows the target dates for the next releases. WordPress 5.5 is planned for August 2020 (Call for tickets has already been published) and WordPress 5.6 is slated to be released in December 2020.

Gutenberg Phase 2 Updates
September – December 2019

State of the Word 2019 – Matt Mullenweg

During his State of the Word 2019 in St. Louis in October 2019, Matt Mullenweg talked a lot about the first full year of Gutenberg.

The Four Phases of Gutenberg.

1. Easier Editing – already in Core, refinement is ongoing
2. Customization – Full Site editing, Block Patterns, Block Directory, Block based themes
3. Collaboration – A more Google Doc co-authoring
4. Multi-lingual – Core implementation for Multi-lingual sites.

Currently, it’s all about Phase 2, and not only to make the post / page content editable via the block editor but add site-building capabilities to the block editor. The goal is to provide a single interface for all site customizations.

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Updated July 4th, 2019 with Mullenweg’s Summer update.

WordCamp Europe 2019

At WordCamp Europe, Matt Mullenweg gave his Summer Update.

On Gutenberg (Resources) – Matt Mullenweg’s Summer Update at WordCamp Europe

Weekly Gutenberg Phase 2 Updates
March – May 2019

Progress on Nine Projects.

February 11, 2019.

• #1 Navigation Menu is still in discussion on GitHub. (#13690)
• #2 has been moved forward already for quite a bit. The latest Gutenberg release(5.0), incorporated the RSS widget. Mel Choyce publishes regular updates on this particular project
• #3 is coupled with #2
• #4 hasn’t started yet
• #5 Partial integration in core is scheduled for the WordPress 5.1 release
• #6 & #7 haven’t started yet
• #8 hastn’t started yet. It is the one that’s most exciting to me, as the proliferation of blocks are getting a bit overwhelming.
• #9 The Core is still discussing best methodology and taxonomy for ticket gardening. Jon Desrosiers published a proposal on how to handle punted tickets in the short term and also how to manage the other open tickets.

Design Updates for Gutenberg Phase 2

Every Friday, Mark Uraine publishes Updates for Gutenberg Phase 2 on the make/design blog. Here is the list:

Nine Projects for 2019

Dec 8th, 2019. A couple days after the WordPress 5.0 release, Matt Mullenweg posted on the make/core blog the 9 projects for 2019, highlighting what he outlined in his State of the Word at WordCamp US 2018

1. Creating a block for navigation menus.
2. Porting all existing widgets to blocks.
3. Upgrading the widgets-editing areas in wp-admin/widgets.php and the Customizer to support blocks.
4. Providing a way for themes to visually register content areas, and exposing that in Gutenberg.
5. Merging the site health check plugin into Core, to assist with debugging and encouraging good software hygiene.
6. Providing a way for users to opt-in to automatic plugin and theme updates.
7. Providing a way for users to opt-in to automatic updates of major Core releases.
8. Building a WordPress.org directory for discovering blocks, and a way to seamlessly install them.
9. Forming a Triage team to tackle our 6,500 open issues on Trac.

WordPress 5.0 “Bebo” released on December 6th, 2018

December 6th, 2018. Today around 1:30pm ET, the core team released the WordPress 5.0 and with it the new block editor  as default editor for content creators. 

WordPress 5.0 “Bebo”

• Grid Layouts are coming, Playground for preview, Interactivity API in the wild — Weekend Edition 291
• WordPress 6.5, register Font collections, working with templates, or playground — Weekend Edition 290
• About WordPress 6.5 – all in one list on blocks and site editor

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December 3rd, 2018.  Matt Mullenweg posted the new target date for the WordPress 5.0: December 6th, 2018, the same day PHP 7.3 will be released. WordPress 5.0 includes not only the new Block editor but also compatibility fixes for the new PHP version.

Based on the stability, testing, and reports on the release candidates for WordPress 5.0 so far, we are now targeting Thursday December 6th for public release and announcement. 5.0.1 will open for commits soon, and will be an area people can choose to focus on at the contributor day at WordCamp US in Nashville this Sunday.
As before, if new information arises that indicates the software is not stable, we will adjust or remove the target date.

Below Questions and Answers are taken from Matt Mullenweg’s  Gutenberg FAQs  as well as from his post about the new target date.

November 30, 2018. WordPress 5.0 RC2  is scheduled for  today. Earlier this morning the team released Gutenberg 4.6.1.  “This brings plugin up to parity with RC2 packages”  noted Matias Ventura on the #core-editor Slack channel. 
Read also today’s status update on the Make.Core Blog

When will 5.0 be released?

Read Matt Mullenweg’s answer in his blog post: “WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ“

We have had a stable RC1, which stands for first release candidate, and about to do our second one. There is only currently one known blocker and it’s cosmetic. The stability and open issues in the release candidates thus far makes me optimistic we can release soon, but as before the primary driver will be the stability and quality of the underlying software. We made the mistake prior of announcing dates when lots of code was still changing, and had to delay because of regressions and bugs. Now that things aren’t changing, we’re approaching a time we can commit to a date soon.

Matt Mullenweg answer in his blog post  Nov 29, 2018

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November 23, 2018 WordPress 5.0 RC1 – the first release candidate was released about 4 days late.  On Nov 21, Matias Ventura wrote: “The date for 5.0 release is under consideration, given it’s not plausible for it to be the on 27th. “

Gutenberg 4.5.1 was released Nov 20th. This is the last Gutenberg version before the 5.0 Final release. There will be bug fixes in between, but no more changes to API etc. – or so I hear. It’s included in the WordPress 5.0 Release candidate 1 version. You can test both via the WordPress Beta plugin.

The WordPress 5.0 release date has shifted from the 27th to give more time for the RC to be fully tested. A final release date will be announced soon, based on feedback on the RC.

Matias Ventura, on the make.core blog

Unless they are blockers to the 5.0 release, newly found issues will be tagged for Gutenberg 4.6 and 5.0.1.

November 9, 2018.  Developer lead for Gutenberg, Matias Ventura announced today the updated schedule for WordPress 5.0 release: 

• Final release scheduled for November 27, 2018
• Beta 4:  Monday November 12, 2018
• Beta 5: Thursday, November 15, 2018
  
• Release Candidate 1: Monday November 19, 2018

After listening to a lot of feedback — as well as looking at current issues, ongoing pull requests, and general progress — we’re going to take an extra week to make sure everything is fully dialed in (…)

Matias Ventura, on make.blog November 9th, 2018.

October 31, 2018. After the first beta release date slipped to October 24, Gary Pendergast updated the release schedule yesterday. He added a few more Beta release dates, which pushed the RC 1 to November 12th. The final release date of November 19, hasn’t been moved, though.

• Beta 2 released Oct 30
• Beta 3: released Nov 5, 2018
• Beta 4: November 5, 2018 
• RC 1: November 12, 2018
• Final release: November 19, 2018

Details can be viewed in the post on make.wordpress

Updated Nov 6, 2018: updated with release dates and post for Betas 2 + 3 bph

WordPress 5.0 Schedule Updates

Also updated the photo credit. The feature image was shot by Val Vesa and can be found on WCEU’s Flickr account

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On October 3rd, 2018, Matt Mullenweg published “A Plan for 5.0” on the WordPress Make Blog with the leadership team that will push Gutenberg over the finish line of becoming the default editor for WordPress.

Gary Pendergast, WordPress Core Developer, followed suit with his post; Proposed WordPress 5.0 Scope and Schedule

The Scope:

• Merging the Gutenberg plugin into trunk.
• Updating the default themes to work well with the block editor
• Creating the new Twenty Nineteen theme.
• Creating an upgrade experience to remove the Gutenberg plugin and offer the Classic Editor plugin.

The Schedule

• October 3, 2018 WordPress 5.0 Kickoff meeting 
  
• October 19: Beta 1
  
• October 30: RC 1
  
• November 19:  Release
  

“We know there is a chance that 5.0 will need additional time, so these dates can slip by up to 8 days if needed. If additional time beyond that is required, we will instead aim for the following dates:” Gary wrote,

• Secondary RC 1: January 8, 2019
• Secondary Release: January 22, 2019

The following days, strong voices suggested to make Plan B to Plan A and not release WordPress 5.0 until after the busiest online business time of the year for the United States universe.

Here an opinion piece on the WPTavern: “If Deadlines Are Not Arbitrary, Why Not Release WordPress 5.0 in the Beginning of January?“

At Pauli Systems, we plan to beta-best WordPress 5.0, help surfacing problems and report them either on Trac or on GitHub. The amount of issues and the time it will take to fix them will determine the final release date for WordPress 5.0.

With the track record on estimating release dates this year, there might be a RC (Release Candidate) in November. It seems to be a given that the final release will be pushed into late January 2019.

Birgit Pauli-Haack,Oct 3rd, 2018   Pauli Systems

WordPress 5.0 Kick-off Meeting

Dev Chat Summary: October 3rd (5.0 Week 1)

updated: October 5, 2018 / bph

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At WordCamp Europe, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, laid out the Gutenberg roadmap for the next three months.

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 hundered fifty thousand blog posts, Gutenberg could be ready to be released with WordPress 5.0 as soon as August. He also stress he is not making any promises, though.

The Gutenberg Roadmap

June 2018

• Freeze new features into Gutenberg
  
• Hosts, agencies and teachers invited to opt-in sites they have influence over.
• Opt-in for wp-admin users on WP.com
• Mobile App support in the Aztec editor across iOs and Android.

July 2018

• 4.9.x release with a strong invitation to install either Gutenberg or Classic Editor plugin
• Opt-out for wp-admin users on WP.com
• Heavy triage and bug gardening, getting blockers to zero
• Explore expanding Gutenberg beyond the post into site customization.

August 2018 and beyond

• All critical issues resolved
• Integration with Calypso, offering opt-in users.
• 100k+ sites having makde 250k+ post using Gutenberg
• Core merge, beginning the 5.0 release cycle.
• 5.0 beta releases and translations completed
• Mobile version of Gutenberg by the end of the year.

Video: Gutenberg Roadmap section of Matt Mullenweg’s Keynote

Find the transcript  below.

Update July 6, 2018
So far the Gutenberg section of Matt Mullenweg’s “Summertime Update”. Earlier this month, the volunteers of WordCamp Europe uploaded the video of the whole keynote to WordPress TV.

Featured Image: Photo by Stephen M. Blythe, allmyfriendsarejpegs.com

Transcript: Matt Mullenweg’s Keynote at WordCamp Europe (Excerpt)

(…) 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.

There is ah, there we go … Optimized for direct manipulation of content, so we’re bringing it closer to where what you’re editing looks a lot more like what you’re seeing on the front page. They have a block aid [inaudible 00:00:43], support for static and dynamic blocks.

Matt’s Favorite Gutenberg Feature: Copy/Paste API

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.

That’s actually what you are seeing in this little GIF there, is a copy and paste from a Markdown source. That’s a note editor or for wherever you want. You paste into Gutenberg, it translates it just instantly into Gutenberg blocks. It’s very, very slick. If you haven’t tried this yet, I’d highly recommend trying it. It’s one of my favorite hidden features alongside … 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.

Templates, Shared Blocks, Nested Blocks and Child Blocks

There are templates for predefined blocks. This is starting to go into where you can see hints of where we are going to end up, with full site customization with this. Which basically allows you to create for your users or for yourself kind of pre-built layouts where you can say, “Okay. A title goes here, an image goes here, some text goes here, a map goes here.” That can be reused over and over again, or assigned to entire pages. There’s shared blogs, so if you do want to reuse things across the entire site, that can be a shared unified resource. So when you edit it once, it shows up everywhere.

And finally, we are very excited about, that we have nested blocks and child blocks. These are blocks within blocks. Like it’s turtles and blocks all the way down, and child blocks, which only work if the parent block is there. Perhaps like your children. Media drag and drop. Extensions where you can add extra things to the sidebar. Like this beautiful “Hello Belgrade” extension here.

30 Gutenberg releases, 1,700 issues open , 1,100 closed

There have been 30 Gutenberg releases, since we started, and 12 just since WordCamp US in December. As you can see, this is kind of running through all the different releases. There have been over 1,700 issues opened, and 1,100 closed in the Gutenberg Project thus far. From the development point of view, I’m very proud of it. We have open development, design-led testing in our releases, presentations across pretty much every WordCamp now, including here. It’s developed a wide awareness. Support and awareness in every single page builder out there. You know the names.

We already have people who’ve extended Gutenberg through plugins they are starting to pick up in the directory, and major sites. Agencies and others have been building and launching things with Gutenberg because, to be honest, it works. It’s not perfect yet. We’re not ready to release it yet, but for the things it does, it does them well. You can actually start using this in production already.

There are now 14,000 sites actively using Gutenberg. So this isn’t just installed it’s actually active. Just released this week are tools for enterprises. This one called Gutenberg Ramp, which is a new plugin from VIP which basically allows them to turn Gutenberg on for certain post ID’s, page ID’s or content text. So that way you can start to phase in. Say you have a really complex setup of WordPress and maybe certain post types of things, extra customization. You can start to turn Gutenberg on for parts of it, not for others until you get to the point where you have everything on and fully done.

But the question I’m going to preempt it, so you don’t need to ask it is “What’s coming next in the world of Gutenbergification?” Which is just kinda fun to say. It sounds almost like a German word right?

Roadmap For Gutenberg Roll-Out

Happening in June

Here’s the roadmap. So these are things happening in June which means they are highly .. [inaudible] . First I’m going to freeze new features coming in to Gutenberg. We’ve reached a point where there is a functionality that matches in affect of in the area it exceeds what we accomplished in the editor. We’re gonna encourage host agencies and teachers to start opting in folks that they have influence over to start using Gutenberg. Now very much … especially if it’s someone who you’re working with close to so that you can start to gather feedback from third party users of it, people who are involved in development everyday and pass that back, of course, to developers. This is to compliment the user testing, since the user testing that we’ve already been doing.

One of the hosts that’s gonna be sort of contributing to this is WordPress.com so there is several hundred thousand, in the high numbers of thousands folks from WordPress.com that actually use wp-admin interface primarily. So we’re gonna be offering a call to action to opt-in. You can start using it very soon. One of the key measures that we are tracking there are the number of sites and the number of posts that are using this.

Then finally the mobile apps, which I said are getting more and more popular. Right now, if you move between editing things in the mobile apps, Gutenberg, it breaks in pretty spectacular fashion. So within the next few weeks that will be all fixed up across both IOS and Android.

Coming up in July: Thousands more users .org and .com

Coming up in July, there is going to be a 4.9 point WordPress release that has a strong invitation in the dashboard. The first time we’ve had this, to either install Gutenberg or the Classic Editor Plugin. So basically we will be encouraging people to get on the train early, or if when 5.0 comes out and your site is not gonna be ready for it, install the Classic Editor Plugin. For those who don’t know, basically locks in your site to use how WordPress WYSIWYG editor  works today. So it kinda opts you out of Gutenberg. We’re, of course, going to be tracking the use of both those.

We’re gonna switch to opt-in for their wp-admin on dot com to be opt-out and I’m tracking who opts out and trying to gather as much data from them as well because there’s gonna be a lot of information there, especially from people who might be using third party plugins on WordPress.com. Be a heavy, heavy triage on bug gardening, getting all the blockers to zero. Then finally, we’re gonna actually kick off and maybe even branch off the customization leads to start the work for what we wanna launch hopefully this year. Which is more of the full site editing experience of Gutenberg.

In August and Beyond: Merge Proposal

So in August and beyond we’ll have all critical issues resolved. It’ll be integrated with the Calypso interface on WordPress.com, which is where the majority of people use it. I want to have 100,000 sites, 250,000 posts made, so 100,000 sites active with Gutenberg over 10x, where it is today, about 10x where it is today. A quarter million posts I think we’ll be able to say that a lot of the bugs will be worked out. We’re gonna merge with Core beginning the 5.0 release cycle. So beta releases, translations and then finally we are planning … there’s work undergoing, it’s not ready yet, but there will be full mobile versions of Gutenberg at the end of the year in the iOS and Android app.

By August, they won’t break when you move between them. Of course, Gutenberg is done in a way that makes the content and the Markup backwards compatible. We’re actually gonna have the blocks supported in the mobile apps so that as you drag and drop blocks, move them around, have different sort of fun things you can do, that’ll all be there.

We could have a 5.0 as soon as August. Some of these things that I put up there, I’m very, very sure about. The big thing that we’re not sure about is as we vastly increase the average usage of Gutenberg across hopefully 100,000 sites. “What’s gonna come in?”

Not date promised, though.

The non-deterministic nature of fixing bugs means that I don’t know exactly the issues that could raise. Whether they’re going to be small tweaks or rather they might be sort of huge things that are going to require a few weeks of development. That is why I can’t promise you a date but we’ve done a lot of testing this far so the nature of bugs that we find … there’s no black swans in there of bugs. I do think that 5.0 is gonna be ready within a relatively short time frame.  And that’s all I got so thank you very much.

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