Excellent for devs and users

I’ve been working with Page Builder for years, and it was just good enough to keep me from exploring other options. After hearing this mentioned during a presentation, I decided it was time to check out the competition, and I’m very happy I did!

The plugin’s rating surprised me. I figured there must be some major bug, or maybe the plugin was too tailored to a specific demographic. After using it for a day, I’m pretty confident that isn’t the case. The low ratings are just a natural part of any big change – even good ones. Props to Tammie for patiently and professionally handling every complaint (it looks like even the same day!). Wow, that’s a lot of work!

As a user, the experience is intuitive, pleasant, and powerful. I knew exactly how to edit as soon as I saw the interface. I didn’t have to review any tutorials or docs to get things working the way I wanted.

I didn’t like the sensitivity on the little “add block” button that pops up on hover. It took me a second to figure out that appeared between blocks and not just at the bottom… so at first, I was adding blocks at the end of a long page, and manually clicking the up arrow over and over to position them. While this wasn’t ideal, naturally using the interface eventually showed me there was an easier way, and editing the page became much faster.

Drag/drop functionality would be great. But it’s not essential. Moving a block long distances takes many clicks, and it feels like there should be a shortcut. It’s still easy enough to use now.

Being able to hide the settings sidebar is fantastic, and provides a very clean interface. I love that you’ve changed a cluttered editing window with tons of buttons into an interface with about 4 easy-to-understand buttons.

Obviously, I love the block functionality. The “Convert to blocks” feature made switching my pages to your style extremely simple. I like that pages were not converted automatically, which could introduce more problems.

As a developer, it was simple to customize (at least so far). I’m using a lot of custom metaboxes, and on activation, this plugin made those metaboxes look like garbage. Any extra styling I had applied to them ended up conflicting with the Gutenberg styling, and I was afraid I’d have to redo a lot of work.

But it was quick and painless, really. After about 20 lines of css, things were back to normal. I didn’t find any !important styles, or floats, or long css selectors to override, so no big deal. It would have been great if my metaboxes had looked the same right out the box, but I get it.

Creating new block types seemed intimidating at first, but the docs are good, and it’s fairly simple, even for someone who doesn’t use React.

I absolutely love that Gutenberg didn’t try to insert itself into all my custom post types on activation, or wipe out pages still using PageBuilder. I expected to have a ton of work ahead of me porting everything over… but my site looks just the same now as it did before I switched, so I can take my time on those changes.

It appears that I can choose to activate or deactivate Gutenberg on a per-custom-post-type basis by disabling the editor or REST support. That’s great! Most of my CPTs wouldn’t want Gutenberg, so it’s great they aren’t impacted. I’d love more fine grained control over this in the future, maybe explicitly enabling or disabling it on CPT registration. But this is fine for now.

Other input: Some kind of settings page would be nice. The plugin seems to work almost by magic right now, which is very easy, but I was expecting some kind of options page to review and customize what I was getting.

It looks like metaboxes using a tinymce editor are wonky. I haven’t looked at fixing this yet, so I’m not sure how much of a problem it is.

I’m seeing two scrollbars on the edit screen. That’s not ideal, and could cause confusion. Switching to a single scrollbar, even when the side menu or page are long, would be great.

The max-width of 636px in the metabox area is a little restrictive, IMO. I would expect the default styling to be a large percentage of the available space, not a specific number of pixels. No big deal. This was easy to override.

Overall, this plugin is fantastic, and I’ve already started integrating it with a site I’m developing. Unless I find some major flaw hidden away somewhere, I’ll likely be using this on every site I develop from now on.

Good luck on the migration to core! You’ve done some great work 🙂

• This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Jess Mann.