WordPress 5.0 was released “Gutenburg” on December 6th of 2018 despite the very vocal wishes of millions of website operators who just wanted their websites to stay stable through the holidays. What a mess.

If you are a DesignStudio agency client reading this post – the main thing that you need to know is this:

There has never been a higher likelihood that something will break than with this update. Most of the WP Development Community is advising taking major caution with this update.

1. 1. 1. It has a very technical requirement that relates to your hosting account. This update requires that your web hosting account (or your server) is running PHP 7. If you are not sure or if you know that you are not yet running PHP 7 on your server, this update will most likely break your WordPress site. Note that all DS managed servers are using PHP 7.2 by the time of this update so this is not an issue for clients that host with us.
      2. The way you manage your content is about to change dramatically – and NOT for the better. The biggest (and buggiest) part of this release is the new “Gutenburg” visual editor which will now become the default way that you edit your content. This visual editor might be very cool someday but right now it is not yet ready for prime time.If you are wondering how well the WP community has received this new Gutenburg visual editor, the ratings at the time of publishing this post were 2.1 starts out of 5. Not good. To see live ratings right now use this link.For people that are worried about this change and want to keep the same “Pre-Gutenburg” editor, there is a plugin for that.
      3. Some of your third party plugins will probably break. The fact is that many companies that develop third party plugins for WordPress are struggling to make their updates to gel with the new changes of WordPress 5.0. So no other update in the history of WordPress has created more plugin conflicts than this one.

Please note that we are helping all of our clients – active and inactive – to get through this together.

We have to update several hundred sites so this is a process that can take some time but we hope to have everyone updated by early January. Please note that not updating the software to version 5.0 is perfectly normal and preferable anyway.

Version 4.9 is very stable (more stable than 5.0) and so there is no reason to rush to adopt this update. Sadly here the early adopters will be the ones that experience the most problems so let’s do this the slow and correct way.

If you have questions or concerns about this update please let us know either in the comments below or by contacting us.

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