Activate plugin now or later?

You are right to ask this question Steve, that is not clear at all. As for me, I installed it to all my client’s websites, but without activating it for now.

Would also like an answer to this…

I have activated the Classic Editor plugin now and i’m on current version of WordPress 4.9.8.

It works fine. For now its only hiding the dashboard widget inviting users to try Gutenberg but i expect it to stop the Gutenberg editor from becoming visible on my site and keeping/restoring the classic editor.

So if you are using this plugin to avoid Gutenberg and continue working with the classic editor then i would activate it now before the switch to WordPress 5.0 (assuming that still is the version that will permanently roll out Gutenberg as the default editor).

Also if you activate now you can see straight away if there possibly is some conflict with by example any other plugin, i think chance on that is very small but when yes then you still have time to address the issue before Gutenberg becomes active.

I’m wondering this too. Can you confirm @damsko’s recommendation that we activate the plugin now? With WordPress 5 scheduled to be released November 19th, we’ve gotta’ get figured out.

I am not sure what is recommended, but I did activate the plugin on about 30 websites. So far so good. But would really like more guidance from the plugin devs or WP folks.

Yes, this plugin can be installed and activated at any time. In WordPress 4.9.8 it will only disable the “Try Gutenberg” widget on the Dashboard as @damsko pointed out above.

If the Gutenberg plugin is installed in 4.9.8, it will disable it too. In 5.0-beta it disables the Block editor.

What does the plugin use?

@azaozz To clarify, if we don’t install or activate the classic editor plugin prior to the 5.0 release, we can do it afterwards? And if a client tries Gutenberg, then later requests the classic editor activation, will their content be changed and left with shortcodes?

@codewryter yes, Classic Editor can be installed/activated at any time. If there are posts written in the Block editor (Gutenberg), and later edited in the Classic editor, some of the block “boundaries” will probably get mangled. This will not affect the HTML of these posts, they will still have the same content and display properly. Also all shortcodes should still function properly (as they are separate from the source HTML).

If later on the Block editor is used to edit such post again, it will most likely not recognize the blocks. In these cases it fails back to the “classic block”, or sometimes gives a choice to the user to switch to classic block or a HTML block.

Also, if the user added any dynamic blocks while using the Block editor, they may stop working properly after editing the post with the Classic editor.

Also, the block “boundaries” are removed before displaying the post, so they will not be in the source HTML on the front-end.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Andrew Ozz.