An Obvious Idea that Seems to have Been Overlooked?

Hi Steveraven,
You bring up an interesting point. This makes me wonder, also, will installing the Classic WordPress Editor plugin also disable/remove the Gutenberg editor? I can imagine trying to navigate clients to tell them which “Edit” button to click when they are editing Posts! I think to have two different editors—four, really–is going to be confusing. (I am counting the “code” view of both editor types.)

On those rare instances when I have another editor such as Divi or Visual Composer, it is difficult to explain that editor vs. the normal editor, to some clients. In one situation, I would want to have some sort of visual editor like Gutenberg for design-type things, but in most situations, where the client is batting out press releases or posts that are basic text with maybe a featured image, the Classic editor is very efficient. So, what if I have Divi installed, and then the Classic Editor plugin, and then Gutenberg is just there by default…

I was advised to pre-emptively install the Classic Editor plugin on my websites prior to the WP 5.0 release, but as yet, that plugin is a beta, so I am wondering when it will be final and ready to use on a live website. Are you planning on doing this, out of curiosity?

Certainly it is possible for WP to install a plugin during a basic installation; Akismet and Hello Dolly are ever-present, and so I have to delete them. ??

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by bkjproductions. Reason: Forgot to check "Notify Me"

Check out Disable Gutenberg plugin. I haven’t fully evaluated it yet but from what I can see it has many granular setting in how you can chose where Gutenberg will be used.

Agree though, all this should be rolled into WordPress as core. Gutenberg as such is just a React override of what we currently have. It is trivial for WP dev team to set this up to give proper choice. The Classic Editor and the plugin I mention just turn off Gutenberg so why can’t core just do the same thing.

What is annoying about this is that Gutenberg has a lot of merit but is not ready to be applied for all use cases as alluded to above. They need to respect how people work and the workflows that they have spent years adapting.

WordPress are also not promoting some less obvious benefits that it could implement with Gutenberg and denying some obvious ones as well which Gutenberg is trying to ape. In the whole are of layout design the potential to set up a block structure sections/row/columns/blocks (modules if you are a Divi user) and provide an API for themes and page builders to use would be the most obvious thing for Gutenberg to have. Gutenberg would be the standard basic offering. If you want more add Divi, Elementor or whatever your having yourself. This would also clear up the whole, what do I do with all the shortcodes left behind by Divi when I have to use a different theme.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by irishetcher.

Hi,

Sorry, my emails were going to ‘spam’ following some GDPR update.

Yeah, one of the main reasons I stopped using Joomla was the ‘blocks’ thingy – now it looks as though WordPress is going the same way, albeit a little more advanced than Joomla.

No problems with Gutenberg being integrated into the WordPress core – just so long as the original editor, or a means by which to disable Gutenberg is there too.

There will doubtless be some people for whom Gutenberg is great. I suspect most of them will not have fast computers to make it appear a quick editor, but rather they will have a slow typing speed.

One of the problems with WordPress is that Automattic’s basic response to feature requests is “install a plugin”, except when it comes to adding a pile of bloatware like Gutenberg.

Why doing so is considered more important than fixing some of WordPress’s security issues in core, I don’t know, but..

.. stop repeated login failures from a single IP address – “install a plugin”

.. have an option to limit how insecure a password can be – “install a plugin”

.. an end to the horrendous “let’s allow over a hundred login attempts in a single request, despite them having different username/password combinations” xmlrpc ‘feature’ – “install a plugin”

.. disable a slow editor that breaks things – “We .. are looking at solutions ranging from a plugin to disable Gutenberg..”

Personally, I would much much much rather Gutenberg stayed a plugin we could install if we wanted – it could be one of the ‘gosh, they’re virtually all Automattic ones’ WordPress plugs without mentioning that (often better) alternatives are available when you go to the ‘Add new’ plugin page.

Suppose in a year or two, there is some new fancy whiz-bang type of editor that would work well in WordPress— maybe it’s an interface to allow “gears” that would be little elements that you could drag around that allowed logic to be embedded into the content. Or maybe it is a voice-based editor. Or any sort of editor at all.

But, if Gutenberg has been put into the WP core, then it means there is overhead for that code, and WP would be locked into Gutenberg forever. The latest WordPress is 30.8MB, Gutenberg as a plugin is 5.2MB, so we’re looking at a 16% to 18% increase in the size of WordPress if Gutenberg is put in core.

I think that by keeping Gutenberg as a plugin, that would give WordPress a lot more flexibility in the future, without putting in the overhead of the extra code. When a new editor comes along, just swap in a new plugin, avoiding legacy code. It would keep the WP core code size down as well.

Gutenberg’s all the rage today, but what about tomorrow?

Hi,

We won’t be adding an option into core it self, that would go against our philosophy of decisions, not options.

We do, however, provide opt-out mechanics like you mentioned through the use of the Classic Editor plugin, or even Gutenberg Ramp.

We won’t be adding an option into core it self, that would go against our philosophy of decisions, not options.

Interesting concept there.

So what exactly would prove Gutenberg to be a success as a ‘decision’?

The fact that 90% of WordPress users would be using it?

Or maybe 75%?

Or what if it fails miserably and less than 20% of users use it?

Would the ‘decision’ of WordPress users have any impact on Gutenberg? Ah well, time will tell.

Given that only just over 60% of WP installations are running any version of WP 4.9 – see the stats – it is obvious to me that they’re not going to get more than that for a while.

As this topic is quite old, and I don’t want ot bother the original posters with lots of notifications, I’ll close this thread after this reply. But please open a new topic if you’d like to discuss this further.

I don’t know what metrics the core team uses, but I will say that I believe it will be a good move for the majority of users. We’re still working out the kinks, but it’s starting to shape up to be a really nice editor overall, and i hope others will enjoy it as well once we start to see plugins adopt it (I believe many of them are waiting for features to be frozen so they know what they have to work with as well before adding their own implementations). I believe plugins and them e adoption is what defines it in my mind though, and once we hit the point where they start to roll things out, that’s when we’re at a good point where it will truly empower users.