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 has this problem—especially if you use its built-in “Theme Editor” and “Plugin Editor” features—where CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and other code and markup files start getting one or more empty lines between every line of actual content.

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.

If you’ve been following the development of the Gutenberg post editor, you may enjoy the lively discussion happening on the subject at WP Tavern.

If there’s one thing nerds like, it’s Markdown, the simplified markup language that converts into HTML. It’s the difference between typing out, for example, <strong>something</strong> (HTML) and __something__ (Markdown)—a fair number of characters, especially over a lot of post authoring.

We’ll be looking at some useful ways to display images on the page that you simply can’t get with the Visual editor alone.

Note: If you’re interested in learning how to use the WordPress Text editor, I’ve included the Text contents of this post as a PNG image and a .txt file. Follow along with the post and you’ll learn just about everything you need to know!