Today, with the release of 4.9.8 the much anticipated “try gutenberg” dashboard announcement made it into core.
As seen from the above screenshot, WordPress prompts you to try “A new, modern publishing experience is coming soon”. Personally I believe that this is a great step in helping to ensure the success of Gutenberg and to ease users into it. For the most part the casual WordPress user probably has no clue what Gutenberg actually is at this point, and this prompt lets them know it coming, and you should test it on your site.
For users that aren’t quite ready to make the change to Gutenberg just yet they also prompt users to install the classic editor plugin which will prevent Gutenberg from running and keeping your WordPress experience the same as its always been. I’ve covered this in other posts and believe its a great transition tool, but it should not be considered a permanent solution.
I’ve been using the Gutenberg plugin on this site for some time now, testing out its new features as they are tweaked and released. As someone who is in WordPress almost on a daily basis I really like it. I am curious to see how the casual user will react to it and so it WordPress. This new announcement will start to share some insight into that. So if you haven’t yet “Take your words, media, and layout in new directions with Gutenberg, the WordPress editor WordPress is currently building.”