WordPress 5.0 is marching forward with beta 1 released this evening. Major items that need testing include the Gutenberg editor, the new Twenty Nineteen default theme, and all previous default themes, which have been updated to be compatible with the new editor.

You’ll want to make sure you are using Gutenberg version 4.1 before updating your site to WordPress 5.0 beta 1. Gutenberg is now considered feature complete as of the 4.1 release. It is active on more than 580,000 installations.

WordPress 5.0 beta 1 has arrived five days after its expected release on October 19. Contributors expressed concern in today’s dev chat over the large number of issues on GitHub in milestones related to 5.0.

Gary Pendergast, who is responsible for leading the merge, said the dates for RC can be changed if necessary.

“We can shift RC if we need to, which won’t necessarily affect the final release date,” Pendergast said. “If we have to shift RC a long way, that would be a good time to have another look at the release date.”

The Gutenberg team has not published a merge proposal to date. In September, Pendergast said “the Gutenberg leads are ultimately responsible for the merge proposal” but the timeline was still to be determined. Unless a proposal is forthcoming, the project seems to have bypassed this stage, which has frequently been a requirement for new themes, APIs, and feature plugins in the past.

Volunteers contributing to the Gutenberg handbook met for the first time today in the #core-docs channel. Chris Van Patten is coordinating the documentation effort to clean up and prepare Gutenberg-related docs for 5.0 over the next  five weeks.

Testers are advised to consult the list of known bugs before reporting to the Alpha/Beta forum or filing a bug on trac.

If this release stays on schedule, Gutenberg is now 26 days away from shipping in WordPress 5.0.