Tag Archives: WordPress plugins

If you’d like to run Gutenberg’s master branch without creating your own build, you can use this plugin ZIP I’m building on a six hour cron:

https://builds.danielbachhuber.com/gutenberg-nightly.zip

Install the Gutenberg nightly build via WP-CLI with:

wp plugin install https://builds.danielbachhuber.com/gutenberg-nightly.zip --force

Once you’ve installed the Gutenberg nightly build, you’ll notice the version includes -alpha- followed by a seven character alphanumeric hash (e.g. 610aa4e).

This is an abbreviation of the Git hash at the time of the build. It’ll help you keep track as to whether you’re truly running the latest commit on master.

If you’d like to replicate elsewhere, here’s the underlying build script:

From WordPress/gutenberg#6285.

Some incomplete ideas I've been noodling on that I want to make public.

Ultimately, the goal is: the vast majority of WordPress users are excited and should be able to use Gutenberg on day one. Fundamentally, this breaks down into two objectives:

1. Make the end-user experience is so good that WordPress users actively want to switch to it. We need to continue user testing as we have been, and iterate based on real user feedback. We also need to market Gutenberg — communicate what users should expect and get them appropriately excited.
   
2. Mitigate WordPress plugin and theme incompatibilities, to minimize conflicts that would cause WordPress to fall back to the classic editor. Success is defined by the majority of WordPress users being able to use Gutenberg on day one. If too many can't use Gutenberg because of conflicts, then we've failed at launch.
   

I've been brainstorming some strategies for the latter, which really is two parts: identification and mitigation.

First, we need to identify the true extent of the problem: what plugins and themes are incompatible with Gutenberg, and in what ways are each incompatible? Some automated ways we can produce this data includes:

• Manual/automated analysis of action and filters usage, etc.
  
• Activate each in an isolated environment and take before/after screenshots of the editor screen.

But, I'm thinking good ol' fashioned crowd-sourcing might be most effective. What if WordPress users had an easy way to report whether a given plugin or theme was compatible with Gutenberg? We could collect this data in aggregate to get a good sense of what types of incompatibilities we should expect, and where we should focus our efforts.

Once we've identified the plugin and theme conflicts, we'll need to mitigate them. Doing so will require excellent documentation, so authors more easily understand the changes they'll need to make, and deputizing other developers to help with the outreach process.