At the end of last week —and five months behind the original schedule— Automattic released the final version of WordPress 5.9, the latest ‘release’ of the most widely used content management system (CMS) on the Internet: it is used by 62% of websites based on some kind of CMS (37% of all websites on the WWW), which add up about 455 million ‘sites’.
The delay in launching this edition, the last of the 5.x series, had to do with the incorporation of a new functionality, which represents the biggest novelty of its launch: the ‘complete edition of the site’ (also known as ‘FSE’ or ‘full site editing’)…
…which enables transfer the same philosophy of editing by blocks to WordPress ‘themes’ which was already implemented in WordPress 5.0 (2018), with the introduction of the Gutenberg editor, to manage the content of pages and articles.
In version 5.8, the first step towards FSE was already taken by introducing the block model in the widget editor (a change originally planned for version 5.1)
Now, the ‘full site editing’ feature allows web administrators incorporate or customize elements related not to the content, but to the structure of the web (header, search boxes, sidebars, social network icons, etc.) without the need to resort to external plugins or create your own theme (not even to edit the PHP/CSS code of the current theme).
Here we can see a small sample of what FSE will allow us to do:
To do this, yes, the theme must be compatible with FSE, there aren’t many of these available yet, but the new WordPress default theme, ‘Twenty Twenty-Two’, is, which allows us to start testing the new feature as soon as we update the site. With a couple of extra clicks, we can quickly install other compatible free themes, such as Astra or GeneratePress.
However, from Automattic they wonder why theme authors aren’t jumping on this new bandwagon:
Dear theme authors,
Why you are not submitting block themes in WordPress as you submit classic themes on a regular basis?
What are the reasons behind it? Please comment below. #WordPress #block #themes— KafleG (@sandilyakafle) January 18, 2022
A two-speed WordPress
What is relevant about this release is that it represents another step along a path begun a few years ago by Automattic to intentionally moving WordPress away from the typical ‘blogging CMS’ model and seek, on the contrary, the ‘melee’ with commercial solutions such as Wix or Weebly.
However, there are many WordPress users who ‘they go’ from taking the turn to which the development company seems to intend to force them, users who are only looking for a simple CMS to maintain simple websites.
Automattic will end support for the classic WordPress editor (in favor of Gutenberg) in December 2022
There should be no problem matching both options, but many users find their WordPress increasingly focused on devoting their resources to developing the Gutenberg editor, and a growing percentage of them opt for any of these three options:
Use the new WordPress ‘as is’, but without just squeezing the new features.
Still using WordPress? but in combination with one of the many plugins that allow you to disable Gutenberg (such as ‘Classic Editor’, the fourth most used plugin in WordPress, with more than 5 million active installations).
- Stop using WordPress, preferably opting for forks instead like ClassicPress, based on WordPress pre-5.x, which offers no more and no less than the ‘traditional user experience’ of good old WordPress.
And this divorce between a large mass of users and those who bet on the current model (the ‘two-speed WordPress’ that Fernando Tellado, of AyudaWordPress, speaks of) threatens to get worse once Automattic drops support for the classic editor, a measure now planned to December of this year (after being postponed a year from the company’s original plans).