It’s going to be ok – thoughts on WordPress 5.0

Morning! 5.0 is set to launch today.

It’s the release of hard work across the community-vocal & non vocal. Thank you for that hard work regardless in what format.

It means we can stop debating when the release is which will at least curb my anxiety.

I hope it means we can move forward and ship other improvements that are not Gutenberg related.

An upside is that it means Gutenberg codebase will be less violatile, which means we know what we are getting.

Another upside is that this is not a security release which means it will not trigger WordPress’s auto update. Which means ( I don’t believe I’m saying this ) you don’t need to update to 5.0 straight away. Do it when you are ready and comfortable.😀

I suspect once the release is out, many people will be blogging and writing tutorials of how to do stuff as we learn together.

Let’s make a conscious effort to make our tutorial and blog code examples show off accessible code. You know we’re going to be copying it. 😜

I haven’t fully kept up to date with the progress of core, because i have faith in the team. They are not concerned so I’m not. The HM team will have 100 paper copies of our Gutenberg white paper at , find a HM team member for a copy.

This WordPress release is not where I would have liked to have seen it or what I would have hopedto have invluded, but my focus has been elsewhere and I wasn’t the release lead.

Once Gutenberg has been shipped and is out of the limelight, we can get back to shipping other things. E.g. the Site Health Check project, which means we can encourage everyone to understand and continually update their version up to 7.1 and above.

Also means all the privacy teams work can go back in and I heard the multisite team have a bunch of improvements too.

I’m really grateful we’ve all been vocal about our concerns and many of us are excited by the new editor but dissatisfied with some of the process around it. Whether that’s the accessibility, HTML markup, the moving target date, the communication, the long form experience etc. People will learn from it. I’ve seen improvements, and there’s room for more improvements.

I’m excited by and other projects people have spun from all this. I think choice is great ( as long as it’s an open source choice ) Our sites and our content is our digital memories and we need to own these things rather than giving ownership to others.Open source allows us to own our own content. And that’s what I care about. The choice of open source CMS is ours and I look forward to a more colourful future of choices!

🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻