Ask a content team what they wish WordPress did better and “let more than one of us work on this at once” comes up fast. Today, two people editing the same post is a recipe for one of them silently overwriting the other. For teams used to Google Docs and Notion, that feels a decade behind.
That gap is the whole point of Gutenberg’s third phase. After phase one (the block editor) and phase two (Full Site Editing), phase three is about collaboration and workflows – turning WordPress from a single-author tool into a genuine multi-person content platform.
What phase 3 is really about
The headline feature is real-time co-editing: multiple people in the same post at once, seeing each other’s cursors and changes live, the way you would in a shared document. No more “are you out of that post yet?” in Slack, no more clobbered edits.
But co-editing is just the visible part. Phase three is a broader push toward the things editorial teams actually need:
- Asynchronous collaboration – comments and suggestions attached to specific blocks, so feedback lives in context instead of in a separate email thread.
- Editorial workflow – clearer states for drafts, review and approval, so a post moves through a process rather than jumping straight from “draft” to “published”.
- Better revisions – a more usable history of who changed what and when, and an easier way to compare and roll back.
Taken together, that’s WordPress growing up from a publishing tool into a place teams can genuinely work.
Why it matters for your organisation
If your content is produced by more than one person – a writer and an editor, a marketing team, an agency and a client – this is a meaningful shift:
- Fewer lost edits and less coordination overhead. The friction of “don’t touch it while I’m in there” simply disappears.
- Feedback in context. Block-level comments mean an editor’s note sits exactly where the change is needed, not in a document describing it.
- Less reliance on external tools. A lot of teams draft in Google Docs and then paste into WordPress, losing formatting and links along the way. Better collaboration in the editor removes that awkward hand-off.
How to prepare now
Phase three is a direction being built out over time rather than a single switch that flips overnight – some pieces are further along than others. That’s actually good news, because it gives you time to get ready:
- Get your team onto the block editor properly. Collaboration is built on the block model. Teams still fighting the editor or clinging to the classic experience will get the least out of what’s coming.
- Define your editorial workflow as a process, not a habit. Who drafts, who reviews, who approves, who publishes. The tooling will support a defined workflow far better than an implicit one.
- Keep WordPress and your hosting current. These features lean on modern core and sensible infrastructure. A well-maintained site will adopt them smoothly; a neglected one will struggle.
The honest caveat
Real-time collaboration is genuinely hard to build well, and it’s arriving in stages – expect the experience to keep improving rather than landing fully formed. For teams with serious editorial needs today, dedicated workflow plugins still have a role. But the direction is unmistakable: collaboration is becoming a native part of WordPress, not an add-on.
The takeaway
WordPress is quietly closing the gap with the collaborative tools your team already loves – and doing it inside the platform your site already runs on. If more than one person touches your content, phase three is the update worth watching. The teams that tidy up their editorial process now will be the ones that feel the benefit the moment the features land.
Want your WordPress setup ready for collaborative, multi-author publishing? Get in touch – I help teams build clean editorial workflows and keep their sites current, so the good stuff works the day it arrives.