Terrible User Experience

I work on many sites for clients and inserting their posts for them on their websites. I didn’t have time to figure out Gutenberg beforehand. When it arrived, I decided I would try it out on a post.

I copied a long, multi-paragraph blog post from a client using Microsoft Word. Then I pasted it into the new Gutenberg setup. It split all the paragraphs up, I had a hard time moving sentences from one paragraph to another, formatting, positioning images the way I wanted, and there were a lot more things that were once simple that were harder to do.

I was stunned at the user interface, how incredibly un-user friendly it is. It didn’t make things better, but actually worse!

Who writes a blog post right in the editor? Everything is copy-paste from an email or Microsoft Word but now with Gutenberg you can’t do that easily and then format things. Even with other visual editors, like Visual Composer, you can paste long, unbroken text in a text box (not that I use VC on posts, but rather only on pages).

It just absolutely amazed me that something this un-user friendly would be the next version of WordPress. I immediately installed the Classic Editor on all the sites I run for clients and have no further interest nor have the time to deal with Gutenberg.

This new program is like how everything is getting connected to the “Internet of Things” but then your lightbulb or door key or A/C unit doesn’t work because the server is down or there is a long software update and it has to reboot. Things used to be easy and just work, now they are too complicated.