WordPress 5.0 Features: Review Your Expectations

Alex Tkachenko

6 years ago

Gutenberg editor is a powerful builder. Let's talk about WordPress 5.0 features now!

Gutenberg is Coming
WordPress 5.0 Features
New Level of Security
Improved Mobile Experience
Simplification For Beginners
Shifting to SaaS

Since the initial release of the Gutenberg Editor beta, everyone is talking about the WordPress 5.0 and expectations around it. Of course, it’s a bit early to understand how far from reality these expectations are but as WordPress themes developers, we’d like to discuss this topic as well.

Let’s review five biggest WordPress 5.0 Features, it will be fun to look back at this article once the 5.0 version gets released!

WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg Timeline

Gutenberg is coming

This is a well-known fact that the fifth version of WordPress will radically change the content editing approach. The new editor will be called Gutenberg and it should bring the convenience and ease that newbies and professionals seek each in their own way.

Unfortunately, as of today, Gutenberg has lots of mixed reviews. Just stop for a second and think about this: the Gutenberg beta plugin in the WordPress repository still has the 2.7 stars and lots of negative reviews. Matt Mullenweg believes that Gutenberg is about to shake things up and become a game-changer for everyone:

Developers and studios will be able to create great-looking templates that any user will be able to update without breaking the whole theme in a few clicks.

Plugin developers will have a chance to integrate anything into every part of WordPress: posts, pages, custom post types, sidebars, there is no more need to hack TinyMCE or anything like that.

Theme developers won’t need separate page builders anymore, they won’t have to develop their own or buy expensive ones. Gutenberg will bring the standard, the way to create awesome layouts for posts, pages, etc.

Users will be able to build websites of their dreams. Finally. No shortcodes or anything like that anymore.

The only thing that we now can do is wait for the new versions of Gutenberg and hope that it will only grow and become better.

WordPress 5.0 Features:

New level of security

Any security breach may become fatal for a business owner. That is why the security improvements are needed in the 5.0 version as well. As we all remember the REST API problem that appeared in 2017, it will be really weird for the WP developers not to work on the security and highlight it in their new release.

In order to prevent any attacks on your websites, WordPress introduced a variety of security WordPress 5.0 features lately, like recommending hostings with SSL certificates, two-factor authentication and other ways to make your website safe and secure.

However, there is still a lot to do and since everyone is expecting the 5.0 release as something historical and epic, security will definitely be a part of innovations list.

Improved Mobile Experience

Let’s be honest, WordPress is still dominating as a CMS with all the tools to build a mobile-friendly website, but the development team of WP still promises to work on the mobile experience for both developers and users.

What do we have now? Almost every theme on the market now is compatible with any mobile device.

What do we all want to see? A chance to edit and maintain the website through the dashboard on our smartphone. Basically, the biggest step towards it is the Gutenberg implementation. Of course, this is not about the technical maintenance of the website, but the overall content creation, management, and editing should become easy on the mobiles and you’ll be able to manage your content on the go, what can be better?

Simplification for beginners

You know what’s fun? While I was writing this article section by section, it got to me that WP team is pretty smart about changing the editor to Gutenberg and here is why. The simplification of the WordPress CMS for beginners is one of the biggest things to expect. And what’s more simple than a new editor with an intuitive design and a possibility to manage content and pages in a ‘Medium-style’?

Of course, content is the king, but they should definitely work on the simplification of other technical steps that users should perform in order to implement some of the plugins, add AMP or tune-in the SEO settings in a more easy way.

Moving Towards SaaS

For those who don’t know, SaaS means the ‘Software as a service’. It’s a way to deliver the software on a licensing plan with a subscription on a monthly or yearly basis.

The best thing about the SaaS is the fact that those apps are managed in the cloud and they do not consume the precious server resources and it really improves the website performance.

This is a very popular way to distribute content nowadays and, I believe, it’s a matter of time when WP team will decide to move towards this solution. After all, we all know that WooCommerce has implemented the automatic Woo plugins and add-ons renewal program, I hope you all remember that WooCommerce is managed by same Matt Mullenweg, right?

SaaS apps are easy to manage and work with, that’s where the future is heading too, so let’s see if WP team really decide to take a new step towards it.

Conclusion

WordPress 5.0 will be released this year and it will be fair to call it a truly epic event in the lives of WP developers, studios, and users. We look forward towards it with a hope and believe that Matt and the team will do their job good enough, so we could enjoy WordPress further!