So after following the back and forth on make.wordpress I finally installed Gutenberg and tried it out. Oh such fail. I think the core issue is really simple – as a writer I don’t think in blocks. Ever. This forces me as a writer to conceptualize my writing in a way I just don’t want to. Here are a few illustrative issues:<\/p>\n
Paragraph to bullet<\/strong> Inserting a photo into a paragraph<\/strong> Drag and drop of text<\/strong> ——– Distraction free writing? Move the TinyMCE controls to the sidebar. The issue here isn’t so much that Gutenberg doesn’t have a good goal in mind. Nor is it an issue with implementation. It’s a higher level issue with strategy. Block editing is a dead end that only appeals to a vocal subset of content creators. This should NEVER be included in core and I’d love to see a competing project that tries to achieve the same ends without the blocks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-9473940","topic","type-topic","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic\/9473940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/topic"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic\/9473940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9473940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSometimes I’m not sure when I’m drafting whether I’m going to flush out a thought into a full paragraph or just leave it as bullets. I write in the bullets and maybe come back and write more or maybe just highlight all of them and choose “list”. But currently a carriage return makes a new block and you can’t multi-select blocks… Ugg.<\/p>\n
\nNope.<\/p>\n
\nNope.<\/p>\n
\nI just don’t fundamentally understand how this is “simpler” than what we had before for the user. It may be simpler under the hood. It may make it simpler to connect content to a CMS on the back end. But in no way is this simpler for the user. And here’s the kicker – 100% of the stated goals of this project could be achieved in a vastly simpler way if you got rid of the concept of “blocks”.<\/p>\n
\nWant to format large sections of text together (like a block)? Click and drag the text and you get controls in the sidebar.
\nContextual controls? The ribbon in MS office does this just fine without needing to split text into “blocks”.
\nMore advanced layout without needing to code themes? Again, MS Office has all sorts of layout options that don’t necessitate breaking everything into blocks.<\/p>\n