WordPress 5.0 is an important update and is going to be released today, as announced by Matt Mullenweg on Tuesday. We would like to clarify our position on the new update along with the Gutenberg editor.

In short, we are not discouraging you from updating to WordPress 5.0, however when editing events and locations you will still use the Classic Editor which is still included in 5.0.

Whilst Events Manager will work on WordPress 5.0, we have decided to temporarily leverage the fallback mechanism included in WP 5.0 so that editing events will still use the classic editor you have been accustomed to using instead of the Gutenberg editor. This means that Events Manager is not compatible with the Gutenberg editor for now, but you can still manage your events the same way as before whilst still using Gutenberg on your posts, pages etc.

If you are not aware of the upcoming update, WordPress 5.0 will ship with a new editor experience called Gutenberg, which has sparked a lot of controversy in the community. From our point of view, Gutenberg is a great step and in the long run will make WordPress better, however as many other plugin developers have expressed we feel that this release date was rushed with little advanced warning along with changing dates on a daily basis.

We have been following the project for about a year now, and implemented optional support for Gutenberg in Events Manager 5.9.5 which was released 4 months ago. However, Gutenberg has been actively developed and a lot of things keep changing in the code on a daily basis, it still will and the result being that previous compatibility efforts made which worked back then do not work now. You can try this out yourself by adding the following to your wp-config.php file in WP 5.0 or if you already have the Gutenberg plugin installed:

define('EM_GUTENBERG', true);

As you will see, it’s still possible to create events in Gutenberg without issue. The main sticking point for not making support by default is due to the lack of user warnings when events are not complete (such as a missing date) or any other reason for the event not being published after hitting the publish button. A clear method for doing this in the Gutenberg code has not been established yet and is evolving with changes being made only 7 days ago. We have options and workarounds, but these are all workarounds and we’re hoping to have proper solutions implemented rather than adding workarounds which need to eventually be replaced or potentially break as Gutenberg evolves at this rapid pace.

These are interesting times for the WordPress ecosystem, change is not easy but can bring great benefits. We believe this to be the case, and look forward to seeing Gutenberg develop into a loved aspect of the WordPress publishing experience for post, pages, events and more. As the codebase becomes more stable and standardized ways of achieving the functionality we require from the editor becomes available, we also look forward to integrating with it ourselves and enhance the event publishing experience.

Yours Truly,

Marcus Sykes and the Events Manager team