No WordPress Gutenberg For Us Just Yet. We Prefer Our Interfaces Accessible

WordPress 5.0 is set to be released tomorrow, and it’s going to be a huuuuuuuuuuuge change. They’re unleashing an entirely new editing and customization system called Gutenberg that’s set to radically change how pretty much everything looks, acts and feels. That link right there will provide you with a fairly simple explanation of what’s happening, as well as caution you about updating if you happen to run a site using WordPress. There’s a lot of potential for site breakage here, both in terms of what you’re all looking at right now and the stuff that allows us to create it. Everything from themes to plugins to whatever else you can think of could cause you some kind of trouble if they and Gutenberg decide they’re not compatible.

I’m quite concerned for all of those reasons plus I don’t like the idea of every post becoming a mini web design project when all I want to do is write my fucking blog, but there’s also the issue of screen reader accessibility. Much of what I’ve seen on the subject doesn’t exactly sound encouraging, and absolute horseshit like this from members of the WordPress team absolutely does not give me the warm fuzzies about the future and my place in it. Nice to know I don’t fit into your release timelines, guys. Merry Christmas to you too.

So where does that leave us? Well, for the time being at least, it leaves us on WordPress 4.9.8, the current stable release. We’re going to stay there for as long as we have to or as long as we can, and if accessibility matters to you, you may want to do the same. There will be security fixes pushed to our version for now, so we can hang back here and do our thing while the various aspects of this hopefully get sorted out.

I should also mention that there is a classic editor plugin available, which could be handy should you decide to update and it goes poorly or the update is forced upon you by your company or hosting provider.

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