WordPress Classic Editor – EOL December 2021?
TL;DR – WordPress committed to supporting the now superseded classic editor until December 2021. If you’re still running the classic editor, it’s probably sensible to start planning for your migration to the new block editor soon.
Back in 2018, WordPress 5.0 was released. It featured a shiny new editor, codenamed Gutenberg, also known as the block editor.
The old ‘classic’ editor continued to be bundled with WordPress, activated with the help of a plugin. So websites that were built in the pre-Gutenberg era have continued to function. Which is obviously a good thing.
However.
WordPress publicly committed to supporting the classic editor (or more accurately, the plugin that disabled Gutenberg and enables the classic editor) until December 2021.
After that date, things get a little more uncertain. It’s highly unlikely that the classic editor will suddenly be jettisoned. It’s probably that there will be far too many sites still running it to do that. And WordPress has a strong record on backwards compatibility.
However, we don’t know the extent to which it will be supported and/or who by.
If you have a site that is not yet using the block editor/Gutenberg, this is something you should at least have on your radar. At some point, you will need to consider a rebuild. I realise that for many, budgets are very strained at the moment. If this is you – please don’t panic, just be aware, and if you can – start thinking about how you might factor the budget in for a rebuild over the next couple of years. Moving to the new editor brings lots of advantages, not least that it feels so much more intuitive than the old ‘classic’ editor.
For my clients – as you know, Hexagon is a small business and as such we don’t have the capacity to be rebuilding twenty websites all at once come December 2021! If possible, let me have plenty of notice for any projects you plan.
As always, any queries – get in touch.
