Why would they do that? If you take a look at ticket #41316, it says: “At the WordPress Community Summit, we talked about getting more eyes on Gutenberg early by introducing it as a beta feature for folks to test out before being officially released.” So basically, WordPress needs guinea pigs to test Gutenberg before it’s officially released.
For plenty of valid reasons, you could want to hide that nag screen. For example, if you manage hundreds of WordPress sites for your clients, you might be worried that many of them start playing with Gutenberg, and break their sites all at the same time. In other cases, maybe they have a particular workflow already in place, and the new visual editor could disrupt that workflow. Or you might not be able to provide them support for Gutenberg since you didn’t try it yet.
Nobody knows for sure when WordPress 5.0 will be released. When WordPress shared its development cycle for version 5.0 back in November 2017, we were told that “WordPress 5.0 will be the first major release of 2018, including the new editor, codenamed Gutenberg.” Even on the Make WordPress Core blog, it still says that “the current release in progress is WordPress 5.0, due for release in 2018”.
However, with more than 803 open issues on the GitHub repository for Gutenberg as of July 31st, I do not see the release of WordPress 5.0 coming anytime soon. I won’t be surprised at all if the next major version of WordPress is delayed in spring 2019. And with a poor rating of 2.7 / 5 for the Gutenberg plugin and almost 300 one-star ratings, it’s probably better that way. But if you want Gutenberg to be released earlier, then you should probably install the Gutenberg plugin and send your bug reports, feature suggestions and feedback on the GitHub issues page.
Meanwhile, you can make sure that the “Try Gutenberg” nag screen never shows up with one of the following solutions.
Add a single line of code in the functions.php file of your theme
By adding the following line of code in the functions.php file of your current theme, the “Try Gutenberg” callout won’t ever be displayed:
remove_action( 'try_gutenberg_panel', 'wp_try_gutenberg_panel' );
Use a plugin to disable the “Try Gutenberg” nag screen
If you’re not comfortable with editing PHP files, you can also use a plugin that will take care of the nag screen for you. There are already a couple of plugins that can do that:
- Remove Try Gutenberg Dashboard Panel: This lightweight plugin is currently only available on GitHub, and includes merely the line of code shared just above.
- Dismiss Gutenberg Nag: this plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository, which means it might be easier to install, as it can be directly installed from the WordPress dashboard. This plugin is more complicated than the previous one and is updated more regularly. If WordPress changes the name of the action hook used to display the callout, the plugin will probably be updated quickly. If you’ve activated the automatic updates for plugins, using the Dismiss Gutenberg Nag plugin is probably a good idea.
- Hide Try Gutenberg callout: if you want more control over who should see the nag screen and who shouldn’t, then this plugin is for you. More complete than the two previous ones, this plugin allows you to hide the nag screen for all users, for users with a specific capability, or to particular users. Unfortunately, the plugin is not available for download on the WordPress plugin repository, although it can be downloaded directly from GitHub.
Make sure to disable the Gutenberg editor completely
If you want to hide the nag screen, but also disable Gutenberg completely and keep the current TinyMCE editor once Gutenberg is officially included into WordPress Core, then the Disable Gutenberg plugin is what you are looking for. You can download it directly from the WP plugin repository. This plugin is by far the best plugin for disabling Gutenberg ahead of time. It has many features, such as disabling Gutenberg for specific post types only, disabling Gutenberg for particular user roles, hiding the “Try Gutenberg” nag screen, restoring the current TinyMCE visual editor, and even hiding the plugin settings page from the menu in the WordPress Admin Dashboard, so nobody knows that Gutenberg even exists.