WordPress powers almost 28% of the top 10 million websites and it’s quite versatile as a content management, publishing system.
For security reasons, WordPress automatically updates itself these days, but there are major changes looming ahead.
Sometime early next year, WordPress will roll out Gutenberg, an improved editing system that changes its core structure. Currently, Gutenberg exists as a plugin, but it will become part of the core files in WordPress 5.0.
Basically, Gutenberg works by defining blocks of content: headers, graphic segments, text containers etc. that can be shifted around to form a page or a post.
The technology is reminiscent of that used on Medium, a popular free blogging platform, or in advanced design editors for web site development.
The problem is, that WordPress is actively pushing for these changes without first ironing out important incompatibilities that could break existing themes and popular plugins, due to dependencies that won’t exist in Gutenberg.
Until fully tested, Gutenberg should not be used in a production environment. After its anticipated launch, there will be a time that many things will break.
Why allow your web site become a digital guinea pig for WordPress?
For now, and to avoid any nasty surprises, you might want to consider disabling WordPress updates completely, and this can be done using a plugin or by manually hacking the code.
The latter is not recommended, unless you’re in the habit of cutting your own hair, and you juggle swords while blindfolded.
Good to know, thanks.
You absolutely should not disable automatic updates, these updates ensure your site is secure within an hour of a security release coming out. Without this, you have less than 12 hours to manually update, before we usually see automated attacks starting to appear.
The upgrade from WordPress 4.9 to WordPress 5.0 will not be pushed out as an automatic update, unless you’ve used a plugin to opt-in to major release automatic updates.