“Publishing failed” when using the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress

When the Gutenberg editor for WordPress was announced I was firmly in team “That’s nice, but I am never going to use it.” I followed up on that sentiment by installing the “Classic Editor” plugin for WordPress which allows you to keep using the old editor. But lately, the Gutenberg editor has been growing on me.

I “get” it now. It is trying to be more than a text editor. It wants to be a tool that makes it easier for you to create different kinds of pages and posts. And it’s actually pretty good at it’s job. There are some problems still. Talking of which

Publishing failed: A possible cause and fix

Yesterday I ran into a “Publishing faile” error when using the new editor. As a result I can’t save drafts and I can’t publish articles. I was scratching what is left of my hair for a while and Googled for solutions. In my case, the cause of the problem was likely that I had just moved my website to another location and had been playing with the .htaccess file.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Since this fix only takes thirty seconds it is something you could try when you are running into “Publishing failed” errors when using the new editor. Simply follow the next few steps on the back-end of your website:

  1. Go to Settings > Permalinks
  2. When you are on the “Permalinks Settings” page, don’t change anything. Simply click “Save changes

What happens is that WordPress makes changes to, and hopefully fixes your .htaccess file. Why not try and find out? Go back to the editor, make some changes and click the “Save draft” button. If you no longer get the error, that means you have succesfully fixed the problem.

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