I am really happy with the 4.8 release: the potential impact on new users and community event attendance is big, and the entire community really pulled together to make it a success.

I’m sure many people are curious and anxious about the Gutenberg editor. You can of course follow along and participate on GitHub, and we’re hoping that a plugin for easy install and usage will be available soon.

I’d like to give Gutenberg some extra gestation time as a plugin, ideally getting it to 100k active sites over the next month or two, before we merge. It’ll be easier (and safer) to get people to install and auto-update a plugin than switch their sites to trunk. We could even put a promo for it in 4.8.1.

In the meantime I think we can do another user-focused 4.9 release with the theme of editing code and managing plugins and themes, doing v2s and polishing some features we brought into WP last year. Weston and Mel already have some good ideas there, and we can start to discuss and brainstorm at the Dev chat next week. This will also allow the Gutenberg-driven release to be 5.0, which is a nice-to-have but not the primary driver of this decision.

Hopefully I will see some of y’all at WordCamp EU, and regardless be sure to tune in to my session tomorrow which you can livestream from the WordCamp Europe homepage.