All your editors are belong to us
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I am not Gutenberg’s target market. I don’t use the current editor to create posts, and I won’t use Gutenberg, either. I use an external MD editor, paste the HTML into the editor, proof, and publish. That means my use of the editor is minimal, but at the same time critical: it’s where I’m making last-second changes, adding images, etc.
I had just created a post, so I went through the normal process with Gutenberg on my local test site.
The Good
It did not get in the way. I’ve only tried one post, but no crashes, no hiccups, etc.The Bad
Everything requires more clicks than it should. Today I can change between visual and text view with one click; Gutenberg requires two (click on the 90-degree inverted ellipsis, click on which view I want). Today I can choose the Category directly; Gutenberg requires me to open the Category list, then choose. Same for Tags. And Excerpt. That’s a lot of extra taps for every single post. (I do not care about keyboard shortcuts. I don’t have to use/remember them now, I don’t want to have to use them in the future.) Everyone of those should be directly accessible as they are now. And, since it’s a common refrain amongst the WP people, this is not “fear of change.” This is “extreme dislike of change that makes me less productive.”Image re-size handles go on the corners of an image, not the sides. That is universal across all platforms, apps, etc. I looked for quite a while for how to resize the image before I tried the sides out of desperation.
Image captions can be bolded and italicized, but can’t be justified left/right/centered. Why is that? Oh, it’s probably defaulting to the CSS for an image caption.
But then why do paragraphs have justification buttons? Are they overriding the CSS I have for a paragraph? Why, yes they are, apparently. How are they doing that? Text mode shows both ornamentation and a couple of classes added to my <p> attribute, but where are those classes? What does their CSS look like? They’re not in my styles.css.
This does not appear to be limited to paragraph blocks. It appears that any block can override the theme’s CSS. WHAT? And where is this invisible CSS? What control do we have over it? From all appearances, none. So authors can format their posts however they want to, with no regard to how I’ve set up the site’s theme? And someone (multiple someone’s) thought this was a good idea? Here’s a hint: it’s a T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E idea. This is, by itself, a deal-killer.
I changed to text view, added an unornamented <p> block to the post, and then went back to visual mode. That paragraph was marked as “Classic”. What does that mean? How does it impact formatting, if at all?
Lots of questions. Where are the answers?
The Ugly
Nowhere. There’s no user documentation (a sample post is not documentation). Why the Powers That Be at WP think it’s a good idea to foist a new foreign editor on 27% of the web with no documentation is a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie.To summarize:
The Design Mistakes
Too many clicks. All of the above-listed things should be one-click away.Independent CSS. This is a giant, colossal, Death-star sized screw-up. If you want to allow extra formatting in the editor, great. But it should be dependent on CSS that exists in the theme’s CSS. If you want to say to us and theme editors, “To allow background text colors in a paragraph block, add these classes and Gutenberg will use them; if they don’t exist, then background colors won’t be allowed in the editor.” then great. If you want to provide a gutenberg.css in core and give us a way to revoke it and incorporate our own classes in our theme’s CSS to replace it (including with a subset), also fine. But what Gutenberg’s doing now is openly hostile to your entire user-base.
Image handles—on the corners, not sides. Rule #1: Don’t stray from a universal standard. Rule #2: if you think you have a good reason to do so, you don’t.
The Bugs
I put the cursor in the middle of the text in a paragraph block and hit Enter. It created a new block following with the text after the cursor. So far so good. I then hit Ctrl-Z to undo it. It copied (not moved) the text in the new block back to the first block, but the second block remained with text intact. A second Ctrl-Z removed the second block. I can repeat this at will, in multiple posts.To clarify: imagine I put the cursor in the above paragraph in front of the “I” in “I then hit Ctrl-Z” and hit Enter. I then had two paragraph blocks.
I put the cursor in the middle of the text in a paragraph block and hit Enter. It created a new block following with the text after the cursor. So far so good.I then hit Ctrl-Z to undo it. It "moved" the text in the new block back to the first block, but the second block remained with the text intact. A second Ctrl-Z removed the second block. I can repeat this at will, in multiple posts.The first Ctrl-Z then resulted in this.
I put the cursor in the middle of the text in a paragraph block and hit Enter. It created a new block following with the text after the cursor. So far so good. I then hit Ctrl-Z to undo it. It "moved" the text in the new block back to the first block, but the second block remained with the text intact. A second Ctrl-Z removed the second block. I can repeat this at will, in multiple posts.I then hit Ctrl-Z to undo it. It "moved" the text in the new block back to the first block, but the second block remained. A second Ctrl-Z removed the second block. I can repeat this at will, in multiple posts.The second Ctrl-Z then resulted in this.
I put the cursor in the middle of the text in a paragraph block and hit Enter. It created a new block following with the text after the cursor. So far so good. I then hit Ctrl-Z to undo it. It "moved" the text in the new block back to the first block, but the second block remained. A second Ctrl-Z removed the second block. I can repeat this at will, in multiple posts.I only did one action — I hit “Enter”. A single ctrl-Z should undo all of the effects of that Enter.
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On point 2, regarding Tags, Excerpts and Featured Image. These now have a fixed position in the interface and can’t be moved or arranged anywhere you want, like you can with the current WP editor backend.
Yes you can, to a degree, move third party metaboxes but they are limited. There is also a bug tha,t if you don’t have any metabox below the content editor area, you can’t move any metabox from the siebar to that location.
So, you start with a basic install, install Yoast, create a post. The Yoast metabox is in the left side bar. There are no metaboxes under content. The interface won’t allow you to place Yoast under content. As for returning a metabox to the sidebar…good luck with that. Suffers from the same “no metaboxes over here, I’m not taking any in syndrome”. To rectify the metabox arrangement, you need to, ironically, pay a visit to the classic editor, where you can arrange to your hearts content.
In fairness, this moving of third party metaboxes bug is noted and they are trying to fix it but there are other issues.
In addition you can’t collapse the content area, as you can in the current editor or, move a metabox to the top, under the title.
You may well ask why one would want to do all this furniture re-arrangement. Simple answer. It allows you to set up the interface for any given workflow. I have a site of artist’s prints. The very first thing, after the title, that I want to enter is an image of the print (Featured Image), then details such as dimensions and medium, which are in a custom field group metabox and, them the description. This best suits the data entry use case I have set up. On another day I decide I need to do some work on keywords, so I drag Yoast to the top of the pile. I can do all this with the current editor.
And, as a side note, the aesthetics. The overall whiteness of the Gutenberg editor is a killer, with very slight definition between all these control areas and metaboxes. We need the bit of grey between the metaboxes so they can be targeted and easily found on the screen. Yoast has a mock up of this on their blog and basically it suggests the Gutenberg interface should only have been a drop in replacement for TinyMCE.
Bottom line. While the Gutenberg interface has a lot of merit, has potential to address some issues where WordPress is lacking, potential to add some really intuitive and new functionality to WP, the single minded zeal of focusing on this one central content creation experience, to the determent of a lot of other use cases, ignoring them in fact, is its weakness.
You use “you” throughout your notes (if “you” were speaking of…). “You” is a *personal* pronoun, and in this case the person was me. And then you replied to my post with those notes. That’s the definition of “answering” someone. I’m not sure why you would try to indicate otherwise, but whatever makes you feel better.
I shared some “notes” correcting some of your erroneous conclusions in your “notes.”
Bottom line. While the Gutenberg interface has a lot of merit, has potential to address some issues where WordPress is lacking, potential to add some really intuitive and new functionality to WP, the single minded zeal of focusing on this one central content creation experience, to the determent of a lot of other use cases, ignoring them in fact, is its weakness.
This is the absolute truth of this situation and why Gutenburg should not be included in core. WordPress is many things to many people, and many developers/managers have shaped and adapted it to create the CMS and web people use. WordPress is, by a long way, not only for independent bloggers writing blog posts, even if it once was. None of my clients should be formatting the content except for applying tags like h1 and blockquote. Any other styling is what I wrote style.css for.
The sites myself and many others have built using WordPress are not nice little ‘my holiday’ blogs by someone who should have complete control and stylistic freedom. They are bespoke sites shaped around what WordPress has always been, and facilitate the inclusion of varied content types on the frontend, according to my, the web developer’s specifications. Make it optional.
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