How will Gutenberg Affect My Enfold WordPress Site?

You have likely been hearing about Gutenberg, a new editor for WordPress and one of the most significant upgrades in the last several years for the platform. The goal of Gutenberg is to make it easier to design pages with little blocks (Gutenblocks) in WordPress without additional plugins or layout builders and make for a more “modern publishing experience.”

Once WordPress 5.0 is released, Gutenberg will be the default editor. Like all of our clients and ourselves, you may be wondering how Gutenberg will affect your website. Will it break it? Can you safely update to WordPress 5.0 when it is released?

Bizzy Bizzy uses the Enfold theme as a framework for all our websites, and then we build what is called a “child theme” on top of that so we can customize to our heart’s content without losing any code when we (or our customers) update the theme. If you’ve ever been in the back end of an Enfold website (or one with an Enfold child theme), you know the powerful Avia Layout Builder is one of the main reasons we use it. You can build amazingly complex pages with the easy drag-and-drop interface.

We’re not going to get into the nitty gritty details of Gutenberg and how it works, but here is a great round-up about the Gutenberg release and the pros and cons of the new WordPress editor.

As far as Enfold is concerned, we checked out the theme developer’s website and this is what he said:

Gutenberg will probably not work well with our current page builder so what we are going to do is: let people choose, what they want to use with an option in the backend (although the theme default for the foreseeable future will probably be to use tinymce and our page builder)

If at any time in the future Gutenberg is advanced enough that we can port all our elements and the whole drag and drop system into it that will probably happen, but given the slow speed of development of this new editor I am not sure when.

So what might happen during the transition period is that you have to choose between Gutenberg or our Layout editor when creating Pages and Posts, but in general its safe to say that we will do our best to keep enfold compatible with anything WordPress throws at us and that your website will be safe.

This is overall good news for all the thousands (millions?) of Enfold users in the world, including all our clients at Bizzy Bizzy. However, before Gutenberg is officially released, you’ll want to take some extra precautions.

Make absolutely sure you have a working backup of your website before updating to WordPress 5.0. And this may be one time when you want to get a website developer involved to do the updates for you on a testing environment to work out any bugs there may be before you update the live site.

Then, when you update your version to the newest version of Enfold, look under the Theme Options and select “Use WP Classic Editor”.