Which installation timing is best?

It’s a good question, one for which I do not yet have an optimal answer. I guess it all depends on your personal site strategy, etc. Personally, I am installing Disable Gutenberg before WP 5.0 hits, because I do not want to take any chances with Gutenberg messing up my carefully formatted content (talking 1000’s of posts and pages). But that’s just me; again it all depends on the variables, strategy, et al as to the best way to disable Gutenberg.

I think I’ll do the same but probably, before doing so, I’ll setup a testing site with WP 5 and without the plugin just to see how Gutenberg behaves if the admin really doesn’t want it there and checks all boxes that will be supposed to block its installation, if any…

Yeah that sounds like a good strategy. You can also check out the pre-release (nightly) version of WP 5.0 when it’s available (alpha and beta builds). Here is a direct link to the nightly download, and here is the page on which it is found. Just to be clear for any other readers: the nightly version is meant for testing and development, not for use on live/production sites.

Thanks!

Please also note that dismissing the nag screen “Try Gutenberg” Prompt that will display on version 4.9.8 will not dismiss Gutenberg installation in next version as some people might think but rather install it as default editor in version 5.0 as explained here.

And that is sort of vicious behavior because I would rather understand that, by clicking “dismiss”, I would rather say: “please don’t bother me with this again and keep things as they are”.