For the last few months, the WordPress developer community has been moving towards a release of WordPress 5.0. This is the highly anticipated release that will contain the new Gutenberg editing experience. It’s arguably one of the biggest leaps forward in WordPress’ editing experience and its developer experience in this decade. It’s also not done yet, and if we keep striving for its planned November 19th release date, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
Update November 9th: WordPress 5.0 has been moved
The new release date is November 27th, 2018. See the Make/Core post for details. While I’m happy that it’s been postponed, I’m not sure whether this is enough to get WordPress 5.0 to be as accessible and stable as I think it should be. Time will tell, I guess.
Let me begin by stating that I love Gutenberg. It’s the best thing since sliced bread as far as content editing is concerned. I’m writing this post in Gutenberg. I started writing it on my iPhone. It rocks. But it also still has numerous bugs. In fact, the editor broke on me during writing this post and failed to autosave all the contents. Luckily I saw it breaking and copied the paragraphs to an external editor.
Reasons for delaying
There are a two main reasons why the November 19th timeline is in my opinion untenable:
- There are some severe accessibility concerns. While these aren’t new and a few people are working hard on them, I actually think we can get a better handle on fixing them if we push the release back. Right now it looks to me as though keyboard accessibility has regressed in the last few releases of Gutenberg.
- The most important reason: the overall stability of the project isn’t where it needs to be yet. There are so many open issues for the 5.0 milestone that even fixing all the blockers before we’d get to Release Candidate stage next week is going to prove impossible. We have, at time of writing 212 untriaged bugs and 165 issues on the WordPress 5.0 milestone.
People are working hard
The amount of work being done every day right now by the development team is bordering on the insane. Look at the work for the last three days:
I’d normally be happy with this for a week. This is 3 days, also including a Sunday. It’s been like this for a while. I appreciate all these people doing the hard work, but moving this fast only increases the chance of regressions.
When I mentioned earlier today in the WordPress Slack’s #core-editor channel that I think we should push back, the response was pretty positive:
Let’s get this straight: this is in the channel with a large part of the people working on this release. I’m not the first to say this. I hope this post will help the powers that be come to the same conclusion.
Conclusion: push back, and zoom out
All these things considering, my conclusion is simple: we need to push back the release. My preference would be to January. This would allow us to zoom out a bit, prevent regressions and overall, lead to a better product, with finished documentation. Something that’s worthy of the label RC when we decide to stick that on it. Right now, I feel that the beta is more of an alpha, and we’ll end up with an RC that’s more of a beta.
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”
Allen Ginsberg, from Ginsberg, a biography
Perfectly said. Let’s hope WordPress listen. #Thankyou
Thank you.
I agree and I’ve been saying for a long time that the “beta” has felt more like an early alpha for a long time.
Hammering a square product into a round hole in time for WordCamp US doesn’t feel like the right approach.
I had no idea so much work was being done to get this ready. Mush respect to the Gutenberg developers
Unfortunately it’s not just untriaged bugs that are an issue. A lot of bugs are triaged (closed) in a confusing way. For example: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/8322
So well put! The line about the beta being an alpha needed to be said. Thank you!
Filed under #GreatMinds, I published something very similar a few hours earlier: https://mrwweb.com/wordpress-5-0-is-not-ready/
We really need some coordinated public testing so we can have an informed conversation about whether things are really ready yet!
Thanks for advocating on behalf of all your fellow plugin devs and WP users.
I feel the same way: I love it but sometimes it’s frustrating but…Matt won’t listen to You.
Why not have WordPress.COM release Gutenberg as a birthday present to me on November 19th. But bring WordPress 5.0 officially out next year.
I wouldn’t even mind delay to March.
There is still so much work to do (not only in Gutenberg itself but especially in themes and plugins as well as documentation and training) and it’s a horrifying number of people – WordPress users – that never really looked at Gutenberg yet.
Yes, there are a lot of users also using it according to some stats which – according to https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/10/31/wordpress-5-0-schedule-updates/ – makes Gutenberg having a longer testing period, with 30 times the number of sites using it, than any previous WordPress release…
But nevertheless: It’s a big change and it needs to be well prepared, not only technically but also in communicating, training, documenting. Gutenberg has not yet reached the end users as much as it propably should in my opinion.
No one will be upset if we delay the release and get it stable and great. We only have one chance to make a great impression after all, so lets get it right.
Update, November 9th: WordPress 5.0 has been postponed.
The new release date is November 27th, 2018. See the Make/Core post for details. While I’m happy that it’s been postponed, I’m not sure whether this is enough to get WordPress 5.0 to be as accessible and stable as I think it should be. Time will tell, I guess.
I completely agree. They should have never even considered planning such a big release around the holiday season. This makes me very worried about how the project managing and quality control at WP functions.
One question though: why is this post not on yoast.com?????
@Bente I suppose the post is a personal view, thus not suitable for a publishing on Yoast site, but I’m sure the author will tell.
The cruel truth in this world: working hard is great….but actually results are all that matter, not how hard anyone works.
This is not on yoast.com because it’s much more opinion than most stuff we do on Yoast.com. It’s also not necessarily interesting to everyone in the Yoast audience, or rather: the Yoast audience is not the target audience of this post.
Was hoping for the same. Thanks for saying this. Wish it would have been pushed to January. Our product timeline for Writy doesn’t seem to be coming together as soon as we’d have hoped for.
Thanks for taking this position; as someone who unwittingly updated three sites to 5.0, it’s a mess. I agree that this was not close to ready and really wish they’d waited until at least January. I’m fighting through the new editor on one very small site, but on my main site, I lasted 10 minutes before going back to the Classic Editor, so at least we have that. Thanks again.