Preview of Phase 3 of the WordPress Editor Gutenberg

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The modernization of WordPress is entering the next phase. "Collaboration" is now on the agenda. In this article, I will give you an initial overview of the planned new and improved functions. A redesign of the backend is also planned.

The WordPress "Gutenberg" project consists of a total of four phases, two of which are considered so advanced that the next one is now starting. As a quick reminder: Phase 1 was called "Easier Editing" and essentially consisted of the block editor, which was introduced as the new standard with WordPress 5.0. The work on this is of course not finished. But the time for massive changes is over for now.

The same applies to phase 2 (“Customization”). It began with WordPress 5.8. A major innovation here was site editing. Since then, blocks can also be used outside of the content to adapt the design and functions of a website, provided that the theme supports it. Block patterns, the block directory and block themes also belong to this phase.

Now that blocks have been introduced in many places, the third step is about improving workflows. Phase 3 is titled "Collaboration." This particularly affects teams that previously had to resort to plugins or third-party services bc data hong kong to organize and coordinate their work. It's about time, because WordPress has long been used on large websites that have numerous internal and external helpers working on them. Until now, many functions that make such collaboration easier or even possible were missing.

Phase 3 will also bring improvements for individual users, as you will see shortly.

In a series of posts on the “Make WordPress Core” blog, the team has outlined where the journey is headed and is seeking feedback from developers.

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Here is an overview of some key ideas and concepts:

real-time collaboration
Currently, WordPress occasionally throws up hurdles when more than one person is working on the content of a page. For example, a post is locked and thus inaccessible to others as soon as someone edits it. Another person can only "take over" it and thus unlock it. However, two or more people cannot edit at the same time, as is the case with Google Docs and similar services. Gutenberg's third phase is now intended to resolve this issue.

The team responsible makes it clear that these functions should be available to as many users as possible. All solutions that require complex server setups are therefore excluded. As Matias Ventura writes in the "Make WordPress Core" blog , they want to use open web standards such as WebRTC as a basis.

At the same time, the system should ultimately be flexible enough to be supplemented and adapted for individual solutions. For example, plugins could enable more users to work on content at the same time than is possible with the standard implementation.

An important point for these functionalities is conflict resolution, i.e. dealing with conflicting, simultaneous changes made by different users. Or situations in which a person is offline while continuing to work on a piece of content. This is where Yjs will probably be used .

Another thing on the team's wish list is that everyone involved should be able to see who is currently active and editing content ("Presence"). This is also something we know from services such as Google Docs, which visually show who is viewing or editing content.

With all this, the team wants to implement these new features through the existing block API. This way they want to ensure that it works without any further adjustments to the blocks.