Yesterday (Dec 6, 2018) was TheBigDay when WordPress 5.0 with the Gutenberg block-based editor landed in all of our WordPress sites for upgrade. Some of the places to learn more about the launch include:
- WordPress 5.0 launch announcement (with videos)
- WordPress 5.0 Field Guide
- Gutenberg information
- Twenty Nineteen theme info
Changing the core editor over to Gutenberg was a massive effort over the past two years - and the launch this week was both an amazing accomplishment... and a very divisive event within the WordPress community.
I was very much hoping to be down in Nashville for WordCamp US this weekend, where parts of the community will be gathering. I expect it will be quite a passionate weekend! (Unfortunately some family medical issues kept me closer to home.)
I *really* like Gutenberg...
My initial reaction was... I really LIKE Gutenberg!
Now, I've been playing with it for much of the last year, and the more I work with it, the more I like it.
It really DOES enable more beautiful and powerful publishing with great ease.
I'm looking forward to doing even MORE with it and learning how far we can go with using Gutenberg.
... but it needs to work! :-(
However, after the upgrade to WordPress 5.0, the Gutenberg editor didn't work on all my sites. For several of my sites, I had NO PROBLEM after the update. It "just worked." I was immediately able to go in and start editing with Gutenberg.
But on a couple of other sites, when I went in to edit an existing page or post - or to create a new one - I made all my changes and pressed the "Update" or "Publish" button and...
"Updating failed" in a big red bar across the top of the screen!
Amusingly to me, some searching on the web brought me back to a Github issue I had opened back in August 2017.
All I had to do to "fix" the issue was this:
- Go to Settings -> Permalinks, and change it from "Month and name" to "Day and name" and press "Save changes". I received the message "Permalink structure updated."
- Change it from "Day and name" back to "Month and name" and press "Save changes". I received the message "Permalink structure updated."
- Switch back to the tab where I was editing the post and had the error message. Pressed "Update" and.. ta da... the updating worked perfectly fine.
I had to do this on two different WordPress sites (both running on the same WordPress multisite server). Strangely, other sites on the multisite server were fine.
While the fix was easy, it concerns me that I had to do this and that I didn't really do anything. But somehow my act of changing the Permalink Settings did SOMETHING internally to make things work.
That concerns me.
Now, someone in that ticket or elsewhere suggested that this particular issue was NOT a Gutenberg issue, but rather an issue with the REST API, which Gutenberg uses.
Regardless, my point was that I couldn't use the editor to make changes on my site.
And beyond my own issue, I see many other Gutenberg issues piling up on Github. Now, yes, these may be initial launch pains for launching such a massive change.
But I do hope the team of developers can fix these in the 5.0.1 release that I'm sure will come quickly.
I really DO like the Gutenberg editor - and I look forward to seeing all we collectively can do with it!
P.S. This post was NOT written using Gutenberg because this Disruptive Conversations site is sadly still over on TypePad. I look forward to migrating it some day so that I can use Gutenberg!
