Lots of potential but too soon for core
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The plugin has lots of potential, but it is such a material shift in WordPress that it is simply to big of a change to be pushing into the next core release of WordPress in my opinion. Here was my experience of installing and using it:
[ link redacted ]
As you can see my blog runs very little in the way of custom plugins or themes. In fact it is using the 2016 default theme with some CSS tweaks and some common plugins.
However I still had posts breaking when editing them and I could create posts the same as the previous ones. On top of this, here is some, what I hope is constructive feedback about writing with Gutenberg, an experience I found so disappointing and a struggle that I had to switch off the plugin after a short period of time.
The interface I find confusing – I think it is because it is too minimal. I found that it was all too easy to add a block by mistake and then not knowing what the block was or why it was there.
There is too much reliance on hover effects, with things appearing and disappearing all the time. I also find it hard to know where the focus is on the screen as it just uses a faint grey border.
It seems silly to me that paragraphs are a separate block for each. When do people writing ever want to re-order paragraphs. Even MS Word and Apple pages don’t really allow this apart from cut and paste. I can’t see how that is useful and why it should be a feature. Again it is confusing and makes copying and paste chunks of text you have written unintuitive (I know it can be done though but it doesn’t feel right to me).
It took me a good few minutes to work out how to change the permalink on a post. I think that should be always in view rather than, yet again another hover state on the title – why the title?
The plugin appears to let me change the block HTML behind the scenes, but if I do that I get a message indicating that the block has changed (well of course!) and therefore I can convert to block (and I thought it was already a block), which looses my changes, or I can “keep as HTML” which I can then never see the blocks version only the code. It seems to me that having the “Edit as HTML” option is just confusing full stop.
The UI constantly seems to want to add an empty block (a paragraph block I think) below my last block that I added, which I can’t remove, however it would appear this is not shown on the front-end at all.
I cannot figure out how to change the author on the post editing screen at all?
As I say there is massive potential here however having this in a release potentially in the next few weeks or months seems crazy to me. Whilst some plugin/theme authors have adapted plugins/themes to be compatible with this, there are going to so many that haven’t yet done this. Therefore having this as a featured plugin, maybe bundled with the core files (like Hello Dolly!) would be a good option for me. When people have started using it more and other plugins and themes have jumped on board making their code compatible, it would then be a better time to merge into core perhaps.
The other options which I think could work, and I and many others have mentioned as issues, is that Gutenberg could be turned off for existing installs and it is up to the user to activate it when ready, and for new installs the users gets a choice, to either use Gutenberg or the Classic editor option. I can’t see a negative of this.
Reading all these other reviews, listening to people in the community, for users, developers, designs and others, it seems to me that the opinion is clear – just not so soon please.
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