A few years ago we made the jump from Drupal to WordPress as the primary Content Management System (CMS) we deploy for our customers. While Drupal is still our ideal choice for complex data based websites, WordPress brings a level of simplicity and power to the web publishing experience.

While WordPress makes building websites easy, handling complex layouts has always been a challenge without additional plugins such as Visual Composer. These extra plugins make it possible for you to use “short codes” to bring a more powerful layout to your WordPress pages.

But this is about to change, with the introduction of the new editing framework – Gutenberg. Gutenberg provides a simple inline editing experience, allowing you to easily create beautiful websites without the need for third-party plugins. All of sudden, layouts like the one pictured below are possible within native WordPress!

Of course, one of the challenges of this is how you migrate your existing sites to support Gutenberg. If you use Visual Composer to manage your page layouts, there is a Gutenberg plugin module that allows you to get the best of both worlds, mixing Visual Composer and Gutenberg together. The Visual Composer plugin is available to sites that have paid for the commercial version of Visual Composer (i.e. paid for Visual Composer seperate from their theme).

If you would like help getting your site ready for Gutenberg and the next major WordPress Release, feel free to get in touch!