If you haven’t been following along with WordPress news and updates in recent months, you may be shocked to open your content editor in the dashboard this week. Gutenberg is here, the new editing environment being rolled out in WordPress version 5.0 to millions of websites as of Thursday.
While the new editor has a lot going for it, many users have felt blindsided by the update and the vastly different user interface as compared to the classic editor. Even worse, there’s not a lot you can do about it.
Or is there?
What Is Gutenberg?
The new WordPress editing experience is built upon the concept of “blocks” — drag-and-drop content editors for paragraphs, images, shortcodes, buttons, widgets, etc. It’s quite intuitive if you play with it for any length of time, but there’s no arguing it’s a huge change … and people almost universally hate change.
WordPress isn’t ditching the previous editor just “because it can.” In fact, this is the first step of many in an effort by the leading content management system (CMS) platform to “future proof” itself and eventually offer complete customization beyond what’s capable today.
Sounds great, right? But what if you aren’t ready?
How to Hide Gutenberg
All is not lost. You can still revert back to the Classic Editor. The easiest way to accomplish this is via plugin, using the aptly named Classic Editor.
Once installed and activated, you can switch your environment back to the familiar interface, with support that will run through 2022. Over the next four years, you should probably spend some time getting comfortable with Gutenberg.
If you’d rather go the programmatic route versus a plugin, there’s a solution for you, too. Within functions.php, adding the following line will hide Gutenberg:
add_filter('use_block_editor_for_post', '__return_false');
Of course, if you’d rather someone handle this work for you, Revverst is available to walk you through the new Gutenberg environment or bring back your familiar editor.
Just contact us today.
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