The WordPress community reacts to 6.0 Arturo

WordPress 6.0 has been warmly received by many users and it seems that feedback on 6.0 is a smooth rollout. There were a few reports of plugin conflicts, but overall it seems opinions varied depending on which part of the WordPress community was responding.

Over 36% of all sites updated

According WordPress Documentation36.2% of all WordPress sites to date were updated within two weeks of the release of WordPress 6.0.

Nearly 20% of the user base is still on WordPress version 5.9.

Source: WordPress.org

WordPress 6.0 Arturo is a version change, which means it is moving from the 5.x development branch to the 6.x branch.

This may seem scary to some users because a version change of most things, like a new cell phone model, usually means drastic changes.

But this is not the case with WordPress 6.0.

As with updates from previous versions, version 6.0 represents an incremental update that you could say aims to make the website building experience more intuitive and accessible.

Nevertheless, a distrust of the update is inevitably felt by some users and not without justification.

Advanced WordPress Users

In the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, a group made up of members who are developers, the general tone of the discussion was mostly one of pragmatic acceptance that Gutenberg is not ready yet, with some expressing that they will wait a bit longer. . versions until Gutenberg is more robust and stable before adopting this platform for their customers.

In a 107 WordPress 6.0 Discussion Postsone member commented on the lack of sufficient documentation, which is a valid criticism.

From the over 100 comments posted, the feeling about WordPress Arturo in this Facebook group is that it is a good step forward, with recognition of significant progress in version 6.0.

One group member praised the block tree updates, and another said the editor felt smoother overall.

This last observation on the fluidity of the editor is interesting because one of the objectives of WordPress 6.0 was to make it more intuitive to use.

Advanced users and WordPress 6.0

Matt Cromwellan administrator of Advanced WordPress Facebook Group and WordPress entrepreneur, co-founder of GiveWP.com, shared his thoughts on the reception of WordPress 6.0.

It frames the reception around what WP 6.0 offers and how it was received:

“The main goal of WordPress 6.0 was to improve the full site edition to make it more available and attractive to WordPress implementers, i.e. freelance developers, agencies or in-house web development teams. .

Full site editing is the future of WordPress, but only if it gains traction.

The only way the full site edition gains traction is if themes adopt it. Currently, this feature is only available to users if your theme claims to support it.

New features like restyle, page templates and built-in block templates make full site editing much more powerful for theme authors.

So ideally this will help improve adoption in the long run.

In terms of community reception, among the small businesses, freelancers, and agencies that I interact with on a regular basis, their response to the full site edition in particular is very similar to that of the very first intro to Gutenberg. It is too immature to build sites with currently.

Overall, people see the potential, but if you want to give customers a feature that allows them to make dramatic site-wide changes, other tools like Elementor or Divi are already much more proven and mature.

A very good example of this is the public debate that takes place on the Gutenberg Discussion Board to make it more “agency friendly”.

The suggested improvements and comments are truly enlightening to understand how implementers struggle with adopting everything Gutenberg is offering now.

Reaction on Reddit

The reaction on Reddit was more opinionated than the conversations in the private Advanced WordPress Users Facebook group.

A member named sdenike posted that they were happy with Gutenberg editor:

“I’ve been using Gutenberg for over a year now as my only editor and haven’t had some of the issues/squeaks that other people have had on their sites…”

But that comment was met with responses expressing the opposite experience, with one member observing that WordPress had gotten worse.

Why would anyone say that a new version of WordPress core is worse than the previous version?

WP 6.0 was tested by many members of the WordPress community before its release, so it’s not because WordPress delivered an inferior product.

Most likely, the perception that an update is worse is due to a conflict with an outdated plugin or theme.

Although version 6.0 was designed to be backwards compatible, some conflicts with plugins and themes are almost unavoidable.

It can therefore be useful to ensure that all plugins and themes are up to date before blaming the WordPress core.

Possible conflicts of plugins and themes

Redditor afr0flava posted about a weird bug which rendered a blank page for the edit screen.

“My ‘edit post’ page has been blank on Chrome since the urrgh update!”

Another Redditor, laserpoint, commented on how justified alignment was different after update.

“I just want justified alignment for text and paragraph. Why was it removed?”

In another thread, a Redditor asked a question about performance drop after updating to WordPress 6.0.

“Hi, I’m using WordPress 6.0 and trying to figure out why my website isn’t working very well. I enabled debugging in wp-config.php, and found something (missing PHP libraries).

This user explained that the client site was working fine, except that it was running slower and needed help identifying which plugin was conflicting with the new version of WordPress.

Possible bug in WordPress 6.0?

Another Redditor brought up an interesting (and seemingly isolated) content alignment issue.

The member, StinkyWeezle, commented:

“That’s great, but all my column containers are now vertically centered by default with a 2em space between them.

They changed all the folds if you don’t set a vertical alignment, but they still show as top aligned in the editor until you click on each block.

I now have to upgrade 150 locked sites until I find a “don’t hack the kernel” fix to change the fallbacks.

Gutenberg still faces recalcitrants at the classic editor

As mentioned above, nearly 20% of WordPress users still haven’t upgraded from 5.9 to 6.0.

A recent thread on Reddit may partially explain why.

A Redditor named prankster999 expressed his preference for the classic editor over Gutenberg. They haven’t explained why other than the classic editor is what they’re used to.

joker999 posted:

“Am I the only one who prefers the ‘classic editor’ to the ‘block editor’?

I understand the “Block Editor” is trying to make WordPress look and work more like Medium.

But the “Classic Editor” is more traditional in line with sites like Reddit and forums (like Xenforo).”

Others, like rockycse21, okaynoting that the classic editor was more “reliable”.

They didn’t explain what they meant by reliable, but it could be interpreted as a comment on how the classic editor is a finished product that behaves in an expected way while Gutenberg isn’t finished yet and , due to its novelty, does not offer the sense of familiarity offered by the Classic Editor.

So a sense of comfort using what they already have may explain some of the reluctance to upgrade. Why fix what ain’t broke, right?

Editor picard102 gave their opinion that many users actively dislike Gutenberg:

“You are not alone. There are many people who despise the block editor.

This is a bit of an extreme opinion but not uncommon. There continues to be resistance to adopting Gutenberg.

Higgs-B observed that the Gutenberg editor is not quite ready yet, which is true.

“Unfortunately, the block/Gutenberg editor hasn’t matured enough for non-coders yet.”

WordPress 6.0

The most important thing to remember about the latest version of WordPress is that it is an incremental update, not a drastic update. Plus, it’s designed to be backward compatible. This means it will still work with server environments that use PHP versions lower than 7.4 (up to PHP 5.6), although 7.4 is the minimum recommended version.

Something important to consider is that WordPress 6.0, like 5.9 before it, currently only offers beta support for PHP 8.0.

Users who have updated PHP to 8.0 may experience incompatibility issues.

Before updating, it may be prudent to back up the entire WordPress site and database so that if something goes wrong, the website can be restored to a previous state.

Knowing all of these things in advance can avoid having to encounter some of the bugs and quirks reported by a few users.

Overall, the WordPress community’s reaction to WordPress 6.0 is that it was a smooth update.

Esther L. Gunn