here is Gutenberg – move over “classic”

After a few month of watching the Gutenberg development by WordPress unfold, I have decided to move over from the “classic” editor.

why?

The classic editor served me well. I used it extensively for this personal blog and for my company’s website. No bugs, text editing functionality was there and the basic formatting options available as well. A big thank you to the developers! However, it always felt a little clumsy, not really sure whether it wants to be something like a “MSWord ultra light” or another, more convoluted entity.

Hence, I welcomed the announcement of “Gutenberg” a lot, when I got aware of it early 2018. I decided to let a few beta-versions pass before jumping the bandwagon. Im an early adopter of technology, but I’m hardly ever a v1-adopter.

a classic farewell to the classic editor:

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing

And like enough thou know’st thy estimate

Shakespeare, Sonnet 87

my first impressions are positive

  1. bug-free installation
  2. fast learning curve
  3. the “block” system needs some time to get used to, but it is so much closer to a real writing flow, where structure and flexibility (at least for my writing style) are in dire need
  4. once you get the hang of the “block” flow, you start realising the many advantages of it
  5. Blocks can be ‘saved” as reusable and moving blocks around in a post is very intuitive
  6. embedding videos from a third party site is much smoother and esthetically more pleasing than under the old editor (although sure there must have been a neat plug-in…)
  7. the gallery block is much better than before: it allows rapid and easy customisation. I hear all of you screaming that third party plug-ins provide more customisation, certainly correct.
  8. editing images is possible directly in the menu bar on the right, i.e. no need to flip back and forth to the media library

however…

  1. where are the “fonts” ?
  2. how to insert a special character (e.g. the greek beta)

then look at this:

inconsistent spacing between blocks

look at the spaces between first text block and the title “a classic…”; then the space between the “a classic…” and the start of the quote “farewell…” – this is rather ugly and very inconsistent. And last but not least, the space between the end of the quote “…Sonnet 87” and the next title block “my first…” is again different..

stay tuned

As I keep using Gutenberg and discover more of its features and hopefully a few bugs only, I will update this blog.