WordPress, Gutenberg and Avada. Let’s Begin.

WordPress has created a wonderful industry through a CMS and thriving ecosystem for many people and companies across the web. It continues to evolve with one of the most lively and active communities around. Gutenberg is currently the topic at hand, which is entirely intriguing, yet comes with so many unanswered questions, issues and concerns from across the web. We’d like to inform our customer base of our own internal thoughts and preparations in regards to this industry changing idea.

As Matt Mullenweg mentioned, they named it Gutenberg for a reason. Named after Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press which had movable type more than 500 years ago, the same idea that accomplished by making printing easier is the same Goal Gutenberg wants to achieve by making WordPress easier to use for everyone, especially those who are just starting out. Gutenberg is based on the ideas of content blocks with the intention of making this new experience more modern. The end-goal is to make WordPress easier to use. That’s something we feel everyone will appreciate. All of that sounds wonderful, however all of this is still in beta testing phases and there is a lot of unknown. Reaching that end-goal and the things being discussed are the reason many people in the industry are unsure of the entire idea.

We do believe the current WordPress visual editor needs an upgrade, it has not changed in many years. It needs refreshed and many new time saving features that are more in line with today’s technologies. Being able to easily add rich content is a plus for everyone who uses this platform. WordPress has always been about user experience, and so has ThemeFusion with Avada and Fusion Builder. This is our driving force behind everything we do.

If you’ve followed Gutenberg online then you’d know that many are confused about the motivations behind it, upset about where it’s going, disagree with many aspects of it and so on. Checking out the current reviews of it is telling enough. Overall, it does make everyone question Gutenberg. Many developers and the WordPress team are continually working on this and currently it is simply not at a point where full judgement can be made, nor can the answers be given as to what the final result will be. Time will tell.

Currently it is nowhere near running on a production site and so much still needs to be changed, implemented, addressed and decided. When the time comes, WordPress will certainly take steps to ensure testing is done on installs to ensure a smooth transition.

In its current state, it is difficult to make predictions about Gutenberg specifically. Too much of it is still not clear, not implemented or not even discussed. Also, there is no ETA on WordPress 5.0 yet and while planned, it is not fully clear yet if Gutenberg will make it to 5.0. There has been a lot of discussions about Gutenberg in the last months among all kinds of sources inside the WordPress industry. Without going into details, Gutenberg can be a very nice addition to WordPress in the end, but currently also have a lot of downsides, that we hope will be gone by the time of release.

We and many others feel Gutenberg is far from being release ready and the full specs have not been set yet by the WordPress core team as of yet. So with that in mind, we as well as many others are simply unsure at this time. If it will be possible for page builders in general, like our popular Fusion Builder, to make use of Gutenberg as editor itself then we will of course be doing that. There might be a possibility to use the blocks API of Gutenberg and to come up with some sort of migration tool, but so far this is not known. Due to the fact that Gutenberg aims to become a reduced block editor, instead of a text editor, the other possibility would be to simply allow our customers to use Fusion Builder and Gutenberg side by side. Fusion Builder is a far more advanced, professional page building tool and will obviously present the much more powerful and attractive alternative.

We are closely following along the full development of Gutenberg, the direction, changes, ideas, everything. As our customer base knows, we are dedicated to always deliver the best working experience to everyone who uses our product. That fact will never change, not with any new version of WordPress nor with the release of Gutenberg. So there is no need to worry about this topic. We are confident in what we are planning and doing, staying on top of what WordPress is working on is a huge part of that and that has never changed.

ThemeFusion will ensure Avada will continue to be fully compatible with future WordPress versions and will always enhance it to provide extra features and functionality. We are here for our customers and always will be. Our current goals have not changed and we are very excited about what is coming in 2018. We are closely watching the progress of Gutenberg as we do with every WordPress update. Our team will stay on top of the milestones of the Gutenberg development and will make sure that you can enjoy the the familiar working experience with Avada for the years to come.

We will continue to send in updates we things progress and more information is known and solidified.

Team ThemeFusion