In the roadmap outlined by Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Europe in Belgrade, the new Gutenberg editor for WP Admin users on WordPress.com was to be integrated sometime in June. Yes, here on WordPress.com. (Pro tip: WordPress.com is the test arena for features coming to standalone WordPress.)
What Matt said…
Looking even more closely at the screenshots from Matt’s talk, you can see that the Gutenberg editor is also coming to the My Sites/Calypso Editor as well as WP Admin Editor. Matt confirmed that with a one word reply on twitter following his #WCEU talk.
So much for my speculation that the My Sites/Calypso Editor was the “escape hatch” for those not wanting to Gutenberg their posts! LOL
What Gutenberg Solves
My favorite question from the audience at Matt’s talk was “What problem were you trying to solve with Gutenberg?” The short version of Matt’s reply was that this is the Editor that will carry WordPress forward over the next 15 years. I imagine he is referring to the current popularity of drag and drop editing plugins (Divi, Elementor and Beaver being the most popular) and similar editors on competing sites, like Squarespace. However, since WordPress already powers 31%+ of all websites without a native drag and drop editor, I keep asking myself how adding it to core is the solution to that “problem.” I’ll be closely watching those percentages as people adjust to a new editing environment which will be very different to the one they are using now. (43% as of June 2022)
Where’s Gutenberg?
According to my calendar, it’s July already. Has anyone here on WordPress.com seen Gutenberg in their WP Admin dashboard yet? I suspect that if it was released, it was released to a short test list of newer users. Anyone here on that list that would like to share their impressions? We’re all ears!
Still don’t know about Gutenberg? Click through the Gutenberg tag to read more on this site or follow the Gutenberg tag in the WordPress.com Reader. (Which is a bit hit or miss.)
As always, the information in this post is correct as of publication date. Changes are inevitable.
WPcomMaven 
I asked Support about the roadmap for WP.com and was told that the first sites to see it will be those using Independent Publisher 2. I asked whether that would first be for those with custom domains and Support said no – any site running that theme – so I set up a site with that theme.
Another pointer to that is that when I was setting up the new site, the default theme that WP.com chose for me was Independent Publisher 2.
Very interesting. Thanks for that. IP2 is probably the most suggested or default theme when setting up a new site, and not from today either.
I have seen Matt’s talk of #WCEurope on Youtube, he said there will be optin notification will be shown on WP.com, those who optin will get early access and rest will get afterwards.
Thanks! Jennifer for this Awesome post!
Awesome! Thanks Vishal. I’ll certainly keep my eyes open.
I’m just going to leave this here: https://wordpress.org/news/2018/07/update-on-gutenberg/