kevinhq.com - My own, personal opinions and analysis about Gutenberg, the new default and sophisticated WordPress content editor since WordPress 5.0 launched.
Why I never stay too long for Gutenberg editor? Why I always disable and replace it with the classic editor though I am on the latest WordPress 5.2.1? Here are my opinions.
I know HTML
It’s easier to use Classic Editor and switch to HTML / source code mode. Then, write the HTML I wanted to format the content as I needed.
Gutenberg is cool but as far as I know, it restricts the HTML formatting into each block of element and stacks them each other. Pardon me if I am wrong.
I feel that Gutenberg is limiting me, the developer, to write any HTML I needed to format the content as I wanted.
It looks like a multiple of editor
When I added a new block, the Gutenberg just makes me think there are some stacked blocks with an editor on each of them.
That seems redundant for me.
One editor is enough for writing the content of the post.
Not using WordPress as a page builder
Gutenberg seems to aim those folks who intended to build a landing page or any customized page that’s not an article of the post of a blog.
And I am not using WordPress for such a thing.
I only WordPress as a content management system, to run my blog.
Not many themes fully support it (for now)
This is purely based on my thoughts and guess.
I just thought that not many themes supported the blocks formatted using Gutenberg.
I mean, major themes on the WordPress directory, as of now, haven’t explicitly stated that they supported the Gutenberg block element.
So, when I had Gutenberg activated, I had a hard time to find a theme that fully supported the formatting.
Controversies
I read many controversies about Gutenberg. Not only that, I always show the option to install the
“Classic Editor” plugin when I installed a WordPress through Softaculous Installer on some shared hosting I had tried.
That plugin will disable the Gutenberg and replace it with the WordPress old editor.
I also feel that the majority of WordPress users still haven’t been ready to move to Gutenberg.
Honestly, before using a new WordPress plugin, I always look at its rating.
But this time around, I used Gutenberg first since it was the default editor for WordPress 5.
It’s surprising that the average rating of this new WordPress default editor is only two-stars.
Even surprising, most of the people give a one-star rating.
The reason I can think of, why people gave it a very low rating is most likely because this new default editor just
broke their templates or anything on their current WordPress site
.
It looks to me that the majority of WordPress users did not know about codes, HTML and such thing.
Most of them only needed things to work, easily without any hassles on their side.
Most of them were using WordPress because they want to have a website/blog but they did not know much about HTML/CSS and technical stuff.
This is correlated with many hosting companies are now offering the
managed WordPress hosting
, a kind of service where the WordPress owner can run the WordPress almost instantly, without having to install it and set it up from the scratch.
Although, there’s also a good review for Gutenberg like this one.
Puzzling
For a glance, trying the Gutenberg made me puzzled. When I looked at
their online demo, I still feel the same.
Probably, I am the one who had not had a chance to dive into Gutenberg and learn how it works, how to make most of it.
Since I am sure that one day, the future of WordPress will completely stop the support for Classic Editor.
When that day comes, I will surely dive into Gutenberg and learn it thoroughly. Hopefully, at that point, Gutenberg had become more popular, more stable, updated, and had better documentation.
Another experience is when I try to edit the default privacy policy page using the Gutenberg editor.
The whole page is divided into so many blocks though I did read that it’s possible to have multiple paragraphs in one block.
I can’t imagine if someone had more than 1000 words page and many paragraphs and when they updated to WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg, suddenly all of them were divided into a block.
Suppose there are only 20 paragraphs which means 20 blocks to take care.
Maybe I am missing the tricks to convert them into one block?
Should we switch to Gutenberg now?
I don’t think so. At least not now.
Personally, I would just wait and see in several months and years ahead.
How will the fuss and drama about many users complaining this new default editor end up?
If it ended up just like now, where WordPress supported both Gutenberg and Classic Editor, then I will stay with Classic Editor.
Yet, it’s unlikely will end up like that because:
Matt Mullenweg has confirmed that support for the Classic Editor will be available for “many years to come,” which should come as a relief to those who feared that WordPress would drop support for the old editor after a year or two.
“…It’s also trivial to maintain because Gutenberg also uses TinyMCE, so Classic Editor users will still get improvements and updates to TinyMCE —
I won’t say ‘forever’ but I don’t see any reason why we can’t maintain classic for the edit screen for many years to come.”
Just take a look at the bold sentence. It won’t be forever for WordPress to support Classic Editor.
Many years to come, can be a relative. It can be five years or six or seven or even three years.
But the sure thing is some years in the future, we will need to switch and learn the Gutenberg editor unless the protesters can make very huge impacts to change the WordPress team’s decision.
I expect when the Classic Editor is going to its end, the
WordPress team will give us an announcement and many days or months to prepare to switch to Gutenberg.
I believe those days and months are the ideal periods to make the switch.