Love it or Hate it Gutenberg is here
The new Gutenberg editor has divided the WordPress community like no other change in the history of WordPress. Some people love it but many and I would say most people are not loving it. This is partly due to the innate human resistance to change but also because quite frankly this first iteration of Gutenberg is not that great. I am sorry to you Gutenberg fans, it just isn’t. It has some great features and there will be people who are new to WordPress who will know nothing other than Gutenberg. They will probably love it and never bother with “Classic Editor”
What is Gutenberg Editor?
Gutenberg is a modern and sleek block-based editor that borrows some of the best features from page-builder plugins like Visual Composer. Here is the thing we love “Visual Composer” but Gutenberg just doesn’t match the feature rich environment that is Visual Composer. To us it is almost like the developers of Gutenberg were to scared to go all in and that is their biggest mistake. What it does well is allow people with almost zero knowledge of HTML, to layout a website. What it does badly is let these same users to layout terrible websites. They look bad, they feel bad and they just are bad. As mentioned above everything is laid out in blocks and depending on how they are laid out controls how good or bad a site can be.
Some useful blocks are:
- Paragraph
- Image
- Heading
- Gallery
- Quote
- List
- Video
- Audio
- Cover image
- Table
- Button
- Separator
- Pull quote
- Preformatted
Classic Editor
Let’s start with what is bad about classic editor. The layout of the visual elements is not instinctive. There is a haphazard feel to what elements are included in the visual tab as opposed to the text tab. If the developers at WordPress.org wanted to change the way we edit, they should have started with baby steps and just made this fundamental change to the editor.
However, what is good about classic editor is that it allows you to get straight into writing the article with out having to think about how the page will look visually. Do new users even care how an article or page is laid out? No, they generally want the layout to conform to the theme styling. Themes are so good these days at laying out posts and pages that most users of WordPress don’t even want the distraction of post layout.
Final Thoughts on Gutenberg
It has it’s place but vast majority of WordPress users it is just a distraction and gets in the way of making content. For those who want to go back to classic editor, you are in luck. There is a plugin that will take you back to pre-Gutenberg editor called Classic Editor, install it and forget that Gutenberg ever happened.