This one is for my fellow WP peeps and has nothing to do with MLM.
On the off-chance someone over at Automattic might come across it I’ll leave it up for a day then delete.
So having installed WordPress 5 about an hour ago and played about, I can confirm nothing seems broken.
The major change in this release is to WordPress’ editor, which they’ve called Gutenberg. The editor is the thing I use to put content together for you to read.
From my end writing an article/review with flow is now a series of blocks – which is totally not my thought process when I write.
Each paragraph is a block. Each image is a block. Each YT embed is a block. Basically anything you add to a post is a block.
Every block has its own settings, click click click goes your mouse as you try to set each of them. And this is all on a whitespace background so everything looks stupidly messy.
On top of that Gutenberg has introduced some design overrides, which ignores the CSS design I’ve set up for images in favor of whatever WordPress thinks is best.
After installation of WordPress 5 and not seeing anything immediately broken, I nervously went to the editor and began a dummy review.
Hated the paragraph blocks from the get go… but things went from bad to worse when I added a logo image, aligned it right and Gutenberg added a massive whitespace border around it, pushing it down.
I’m sure there’s some fiddly way to fix this (not from within Gutenberg), but why should I have to when I already have CSS in place for image alignment? Basically WordPress expects me to redo my alignment CSS, using whatever design element names they’ve come up with for Gutenberg (none of which are conveyed to the end-user).
There’s also a boatload of unnecessary extra mouse-clicks.
Want to move a paragraph up or down? Click mouse, highlight paragraph, ctrl-x, ctrl-v move on with your life.
In Gutenberg you have to click the damn block’s up or down arrows over and over again, to move the content up or down one block at a time. Jesus Christ guys.
I feel like Gutenberg has been developed for millennials who, for whatever reason, can’t use a simple text editor. Cell phones also might have something to do with it… but then who is putting together substantial content for a website on their phone in the first place?
Having been spammed with annoying Wix “we made a website tool so easy every idiot in Hollywood can use it, let me show you” ads on YouTube this past year, I get the feeling WordPress is trying to compete.
Gutenberg might be easier to use when putting together “Hay, here’s my cat!” type content, but for anything else it’s a nightmare.
What with all the mouse-clicking and needlessly switching between a bazillion blocks of content per article, content that might have previously taken me a few hours will take three weeks or so in Gutenberg.
Not to mention the downtime if I have to waste my time figuring out how to override Gutenberg’s “out of the box even though you didn’t ask for them” design overrides.
What a mess.
Luckily there’s legacy support for the old editor via plugin, which is what I’m writing this on (and sort of testing to make sure it works before I get back to writing regular content tomorrow).
Automattic has said they’ll support the classic editor till at least 2022 – by which time hopefully Gutenberg will actually be usable, gone, or we’ll all be using whatever replaced WordPress between now and then.
Honestly? I’m good either way. I’ve been a big fan of WordPress for over a decade now but this latest fundamental change to WordPress content creation is terrible.
Source: WordPress 5 Gutenberg is terrible.