Nice idea, but with a total mess as result

Generally I am open to new ideas – that’s why I moved with my existing website with more than 1000 articles and pages to WordPress many years ago and even created an import script to migrate all the existing content to WordPress using the API.

What I really liked so far is the “classic” editor! Yes – even with it’s flaws TinyMCE is still totally fine for everday work. Beside my own website I run a number of sites for friends and clients – including a film festival for which I used custom post types to maintain a simple movie database for the program – and it works really fine and can even stand the load of thousands visitors every hour during the festival.

In all the years I never had any complaint about the editor from any of my clients. It just works. Yes, maybe complex table structures may be a problem and sometimes there are issues – but most of the time nobody needs complex table structures and 99% of all content just works. Also “rich media” is not the main focus for most websites I know. Even the film festival I work for does not need extensive “rich media” in their blog post. YouTube and Vimeo works just fine, images and galleries are not a problem either. Just paste the link from YouTube or Vimeo to your post and voilà you get the preview inside the editor – what’s not to like about?

The workflow with TinyMCE is straight forward: just write and use the tool bar to change formats or insert elements like images. If needed, extend this using “TinyMCE advanced” (which should be in the core of WP!).

And with Gutenberg?

Every block level element is now a “content block”. Even a new heading or a simple list is a “block”. What does this mean?

First of all: There is no “WYSIWYG” any longer, as the existing theme styles for TinyMCE do not work any longer due to the complex structure in the editor. So you have to go through a more or less painful process to adapt all the existing editor styles for Gutenberg – for every single theme you ever created!

Next problem: Since Gutenberg replaces the whole editing screen, custom fields don’t show up any longer. But these may be crucial for some websites.

And the major problem:

Gutenberg introduces new “manual” formatting with block settings – this is an absolute NO GO! Examples:

Spacer: A block level element with an inline style to define the absolute height with “px”. Seriously? What about responsive design?

Background and text colour for paragraphs: Yes, you use at least CSS classes. But again one can also just pick a color from a color picker and this also creates an inline style again. Seriously?

Font sizes: One can set a font size – and you already guessed it… again an inline style.

And so on… I did not check every single block type where user actions will create inline styles.

This is OK for a private hobby website – but for a company site or any other “offial” site which needs a consistent design this is an absolute mess! Imagine you create a theme and carefully develop all the CSS classes and styles needed for the CI – and then users are allowed to set their own font sizes, colors, manually spacers and so on and literally destroy the design with their own idea what looks “nice”.

This reminds me to the time when the first DTP programs and office programs with graphical interface and laser printers started to show up: suddenly people started to use at least 10 different fonts in a document and created every kind of wild combination of formatting and inline images – not because they did know how typography works but just because they could!

“Gutenberg” has nothing to do with good typography and design! It is an approach to give people with absolutely zero knowledge about design and typography the ability to modify nearly every aspect of the visual appearance of the website.

The argument that you can create content blocks for specific content types is valid – but to be honest: how many times did you need to add – for example – a “employee description” as a content block? Those who are responsible to add new employee descriptions to the company website know how to do that and for a developer it is really not that hard to add a custom button to TinyMCE which opens a dialog window where you can add all the information needed to build a shortcode. You can also add a visual presentation inside the editor as galleries, oEmbed elements or “more” sections clearly demonstrate. And how often does oEmbed not work? I never had any case where I could not embed YouTube, Vimeo or Tweets etc. properly.

“Gutenberg” maybe OK for people who like to work this way – but is NOT the way, how WordPress editing should be in the future since it will produce an absolute mess of manually formatted content which can not be handled any more ever. Good look with hundreds of inline styles in future WordPress based sites.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Arno Welzel. Reason: Fixed some typos