Today, Elegant Themes stripped the Beta tag from Divi 5 and made it an official release, available for download and upgrade. How did it go...?
Upgrading to the public release
I did not expect any troubles switching from Divi 5 Beta 9.3 to the official release 5.0.1. And there were none.
My test sites (including this one) upgraded without problems, and the Divi Changelog shows additional fixes included since the last Beta. So no problems here.
One thing many people are eager to see is the full-page editing that was so powerful inside the Divi 4 interface. Meaning, one could edit also the header and footer that were built with the Theme Builder.
It's still not included with Divi 5.0.1, but Elegant Themes confirms it's already inside the very next upgrade (5.0.2) which should be available shortly.
Third-party solutions
It is understandable that many third-party plugins vere not yet adapted to full Divi 5 compatibility. Since it was only a Beta release, there were stull some significant changes coming to the core itself and there's no math in doing a rebuild on the Beta.
Now, since Divi 5 is an official release, people missing the functionalities can call out the developers and tell them they need their solutions to work.
One example of this is Rank Math, one of the best SEO plugins I've encountered. I'm jusing it everywhere, because it does what it promises. The problem was that Rank Math could not read the new Divi 5 text format as saved in the database, which resulted in missing data inside their dashboard (read more). Their stand was clear - they're developing a fully compatible version only after Divi exits the Beta phase.
I'm one of those people waiting for this to happen really fast now.
What about the Divi specific plugins and tools?
Many developers that create Divi-specific plugins and tools have started to develop compatible solutions when Divi 5 was in its Alpha. They wanted to be ready when the time comes and the official release is done.
Many have their solutions ready, maybe with a few modules missing, but they're surely hard at work. I'm talking about
and so on.
Most of their solutions are Divi 5 ready, and if you're using any of them, you've been informed about that with the Update requests inside WordPress.
I'm personally using almost all of them, depending on the functionalities of sites. I will actually be able to replace some of them by Divi 5's new functionalities, but surely not all of them. And it will take some time for sure, because Divi 5 is something that draws a relatively steep learning curve.
Should you upgrade and switch from Divi 4?
Divi 5 is faster, more powerful, and much more likeable to use in its official release.
But it's not that simple.
There are far more things to consider than just the speed, and I'll do a separate post on that.
Let's just say that if you took some time and played with Divi 5 before its official release, you are probably already aware of at least some of its benefits and pain points. So it's totally upon you to decide whether you will switch immediately.
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