Change Doesn’t Come Easy – But Sometimes It’s Totally Wrong

I’m updating this review to reflect how Gutenberg has changed since I originally write it.

I’ve been forcing myself to learn Gutenberg for the last 8 months. The developers have really taken the time to listen to complaints and make adjustments.

Gutenberg is much easier to use now, and yes it does still take some getting used to – that being said, lots of the things I really hated about it have been addressed and it’s now my default editor. The preview of a post still takes a long time, which is why I can’t give it 5 stars but the automatic refreshing of the preview tab every time you save a draft is something I really like and never knew I needed it until I had it.

I’ve found that teaching a new person to use WordPress with Gutenberg is no more of an effort than teaching when Classic Editor was the standard. The writing flows much better than on Gutenberg’s original release, and you can now copy/paste from Word Documents and keep the formatting and paragraph breaks intact (provided they were done correctly in Word of course).

As a result, I’ve changed my 1 star review to a 4-star review. It’s not perfect and has a way to go, but it’s as good as the Classic Editor in my opinion (which wasn’t perfect either).

****OLD REVIEW****

I really tried not to be one ‘those’ people who complained about change. I really wanted to give Gutenberg a chance and when I first read about it and tried it as a plugin, I was excited at the potential. I was especially excited about the idea of replacing page builders like WPBakery or Elementor because they’re hard to escape from once a site is built on those.

But alas, my excitement has now gone and all of my 25 sites have the Classic Editor plugin installed. What really killed it for me was that even after learning my way around Gutenberg like a pro, it was still much slower to write a post than using the Classic Editor. Time is money. Speaking of time – doing a preview on a post in Gutenberg takes at least twice as long to process as with the Classic Editor. Again, Time is money.

If you’re a blogger, there’s no way to develop an efficient writing flow with Gutenberg. And if you’re like me where you have non-technical clients writing their own content, you can forget anything but the Classic Editor for them. My selling point with WordPress to my non-technical clients was always, “If you can use Microsoft Word, you can use WordPress”. But Gutenberg kills that.

I might still use Gutenberg for static pages because it does have quite a few options that might be worth the headache – but only on pages that I don’t have to change very often.

I would love to see Gutenberg get better or go back to the Classic Editor with the ability to add Gutenberg blocks on the fly.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by CGS Web Designs.