The newest version of WordPress is released!

First things first

A big thank you to all contributors for their hard work on WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg.

What's new?

Gutenberg

This newest version includes a new default editor to create content in your new website and a new default theme. It's definitely a step forward from the visual editor.

The biggest change that comes along with the update is seeing Gutenberg as the new default editor in WordPress.  As you can see on both screenshots below, the Gutenberg editor requires a completely different approach if you are accustomed to the previous editor (the visual editor).

Inside the Gutenberg editor, you can start typing, as if you're working in the visual editor. However, doing that means missing out on a lot of new and powerful features that are available out of the box in Gutenberg.

You should think of Gutenberg as a block editor. Your content is a collection of  blocks. The advantage of having blocks in the editor is the flexibility for you, as a writer, to add an appealing structure and have extra layout options at your fingertips. All this without extra coding. Did you ever try to place an image and a paragraph of text side by side in the visual editor? Gutenburg offers a block to assist you with this.

Curious about how the new Gutenberg editor works? Try some testing on https://wordpress.org/gutenberg.

Don't want to upgrade your website to 5.0 just yet? But still, you would like to experiment? Feel free to install the Gutenberg editor as a plugin in your website! 

The process

After more than a year of active development and planning, privacy features that needed implementation on the WordPress Core, the 5.0 version of WordPress has been released.

The release has been postponed multiple times, as requested by the developer community. The main concerns were the quality of the Gutenberg editor, and the implementation of the accessibility guidelines in Gutenberg.

During the development process, some strong signals were heard from individual community members, plugin developers and bloggers expressing their concerns about the upcoming release. Let's hope the community is able to regroup and learn from what has happened last year.
Why not make the community better together and prevent #WPdrama on next major (feature) releases. 

Gutenberg add-ons

There are a few plugins that will add blocks to Gutenberg.
One I want to mention specifically is the Atomic Block plugin, which adds some nice extra blocks. We might expect new and existing plugins to add specific blocks over time.

Theme: Twenty Nineteen

WordPress has a history of packing a few default themes in their releases. Since 2010, they carry the name of a year. In this release, a new default theme 'Twenty Nineteen' is included. The main focus of this new default theme is compatibility with the Gutenberg editor. So all blocks are supported as good as possible.

Obviously you can choose any theme from the vast WordPress theme directory.