WordPress 5.4, “Adderley,” launched yesterday, March 31, 2020. It’s a very Gutenberg-focused release, with two new default blocks—Buttons and Social Icons—plus a lot of other improvements to the block editor.

The Gutenberg block editor has now been a part of WordPress core for a year. This milestone seems like a perfect time to revisit one of the most anticipated and controversial features ever to be added to the world’s most popular CMS.

I’ll be honest: Since Gutenberg launched, I’ve used the Classic Editor plugin to disable it on every site I work on. I do this for a few reasons:

Big news in WordPress: on December 6, 2018 (last Thursday as I’m writing), WordPress 5.0 shipped. Among a few smaller updates was one massive one: the long-awaited Gutenberg editor has replaced the TinyMCE editor as WordPress’s official content editor.

WordPress 5.0 is releasing tomorrow. December 6, 2018. Yay!?

There are few brands more synonymous with quality in the web development niche than CSS-Tricks. (A List Apart comes to mind. Smashing Magazine, maybe. We work for you to think of us that way…)

As Gutenberg gets closer, more and more people are trying to wrap their head around it. Zac Gordon’s Gutenberg development course is perfect if you’re really getting into it. But if you’re just looking into how to get started, this blog post he made a few months ago is as relevant and accurate as ever.

At WordCamp US, it became clear that the Gutenberg editor is a tangible improvement to WordPress—and, more importantly, is really going to happen.

This year, it’s felt like change is in the air. The WordPress landscape seems to be shifting at the small-to-medium client level, with ever-stronger competitors driving attempted innovation within WordPress, while some giant players (huge hosting companies, “everything” themes) continue to gobble up huge numbers of the worst-informed customers and the rest of the marketplace starts to crunch.

In a development that seems destined to silence doubters like me, ReactJS moved to relicense itself under the thoroughly open-source-friendly MIT license—dropping the “patent clause” that it had included for arguably sane reasons but that had caused WordPress to drop React for Gutenberg and Calypso, and for the Apache project to blacklist React as well.