Adjusting to 5.0

The new editor does have a HTML view, but they hid it under one of the things you see when clicking the 3 dot icon in the upper right.
To get back to the old editor, click the WordPress icon in the upper left which will show you the About page, and there you can read about the Classic Editor plugin, with a link to install it.

I think you are asking for the “helper” buttons on the HTML tab of the old interface that looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/mk8kl4b.png

Yes, in 5.0, it seems this is gone from the HTML block and the HTML tab of the Classic Block.

You could install the Classic Editor plugin to revert to the old editor and keep your old process intact.

Or, you could paste your content into a Classic Block, and use the Tiny MCE buttons in the Visual editor tab of that block.

On most of the sites that I have updated, existing content went into a Classic Block– all the content into one block. If you select the 3 vertical dots on that block, you can edit this text as HTML.

When you are seeing “No block selected”, it just means that you have not clicked into a block. If you click into a block, this area will show you the type of block you have selected.

Does this help?

I understand your confusion.

For backward compatibility and simplicity, editing an old post is different than creating a new one.

When you open an old post, you will see the title, as always, and the old post content will be put into one block, called the “Classic Block”. It is similar to the old classic editor.

For new posts, you are starting with a blank slate. So, what you do is to click down below the title into the area where the cursor is. Then, just start typing. As you type in paragraphs, each paragraph will be made into a new block.

Buttons for things like italics and bold and such are context sensitive. Select some text, click the icons that appear at the top of that block.

To select a block and change its settings, click the block. You can create new blocks manually of different types, or convert blocks from one type to another.

I would encourage experimentation. Here, I’ll make a quick example for you.

There’s a ton of video tutorials out there that are much better at explaining things (and typing) than I am. Try looking up some of those. Just google for “Gutenberg tutorial” and you’ll find ’em.

I appreciate everyone’s help, and I may not be free to follow up until Tuesday, so I’ll let you know. However, I should say that I already opened a post and looked in the 3-dot menu for an html option and just don’t see it. And I selected a word and didn’t see anything new to format it or link to it appear. (I liked how in the old view you could hit “link” and be offered links you’d used just a moment before, for when I was linking different things to a new post.) But perhaps experiment will reveal what I seem obviously to be stubbornly missing.

However, I should say that I already opened a post and looked in the 3-dot menu for an html option and just don’t see it.

It’s called “Code View” but the truth is that you don’t need it, nor should you need it. The goal of the new editor is for people to not need to switch to the code view, nor should anybody need to know code. You should just be able to do what you want to do using the editor directly.

However, if you do need an HTML view, the Code view is one way to see the whole post’s code, but each individual block can also be edited as HTML directly. Same thing, use the three dot menu on the block, and select the “Edit as HTML” option for that block.

And I selected a word and didn’t see anything new to format it or link to it appear.

The link icon is pretty much the same (see my video above for an example on how to use it).

Thanks again so much. The video is great. But I just wish I saw what it and you are seeing!

Just now, I again reopened an unpublished post. I don’t really follow what you did in the video around 1:20 to make a tag bar appear, and I am feeling really stupid but I still can’t replicate it. Say, I tried moving the cursor with the mouse or typing a couple of spaces or letters, but nada.

Then I see in the video a frequent recourse to an icon at lower left, used for changing the character of a block, and can’t find that either in practice. So couldn’t, say, add an image either except by hand coding (which to be frank is what I’d normally do). I keep, shall we say, experimenting by moving around and typing, but nope.

And last, I still don’t see Code View among the choices in the upper right 3-dot menu. Instead I see three items under View (Top Toolbar, Spotlight Mode, and Fullscreen Mode, where I tried checking one at a time the first two without seeing a change), three Tools (Manage All Reusable Blocks, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Copy All Content, where the first hides the post for a screen with no blocks shown, the second displays common keyboard shortcuts no doubt for reference, and the third I didn’t try), and Options (where most of the boxes are checked by default). I should say that I’m guessing I’m in Code View by default, since the video shows links as blue underscore, whereas (as I think I may have said) I’m seeing partial code, including a tags.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by jhaber31.

I don’t really follow what you did in the video around 1:20 to make a tag bar appear, and I am feeling really stupid but I still can’t replicate it.

Near as I can tell, all I did there was to click the mouse. I use a video recorder that highlights the mouse in yellow, and makes those little circles around it when I click, so that it’s clearer what is going on.

Click on a block, and the bar appears above it. That’s true for all the blocks. That’s how the new editor works.

Just checking, but do you have the visual editor disabled? Go to Users->Your Profile. The first option on the page is to disable the Visual Editor. Make sure you have that unchecked. If it’s checked, then uncheck it, scroll down, and then save your profile. Then try the editor.

Is there a way to force the new editor to keep paragraph and break line code, because I see it in when editing in the backend in HTML, but once it’s published all the <p> tags are stripped, making the formatting on the front end come out completely different?

And no, I don’t want to revert to the Classic Editor, as that one was even more of a pain in the ass to deal with in Visual mode.

@crazyserb We generally prefer people to make new topics for their problems instead of posting in other people’s.

However, if you have Jetpack installed, make sure that you update it to the latest version. In old versions, there was an issue with the markdown functionality that would cause it to strip paragraph tags as you have seen. This should be fixed now, or if you need to keep the old version for some reason, you can turn off the Markdown support in the Jetpack settings.

It is also possible that you have a different plugin causing the same problem. Try disabling your other plugins and seeing which of them is causing the interference.

Ah, you’re right. I unchecked disabling visual editor, and it changed appearance as well as restoring the menu options at right. I also found that clicking in a paragraph now created the tag toolbar, with more options than I yet understand, but I can experiment. Indeed, looks like I’m going to have a LOT of experimenting to do to get this under control.

Still, I have to say that, at best, this will take a long time getting used to. For one thing, I honestly liked the ability both to see tags and to use a tag toolbar rather than laboriously type tags in, just as my Web editor allows me not to operate in WYSIWIG mode but still to get it to do most of the work. It is what I’m used to in my Web editing for 25 years and feels like the bes of both worlds. This way, for instance, I can see that I indeed have tag attributes that I intended to specify (particularly ones for images, so that a mouseover gives a caption). Now I can see myself constantly going back and forth between views.

Second, while I discovered in the context menu the special characters icon, answering my question about em dashes, I still am puzzled at the vanishing paragraph tags.

Third, is it ok that, while it’s not code view, it’s not exactly WYSIWIG, since an image appears without text wrapping, although if I go to preview it’s fine? Anyhow, my first reaction is just wanting to go back to the old WordPress, although I realize I probably have only a couple of years of ability to do so.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by jhaber31.

Ah, I think I see now why the images appear oddly. When I began, I used set each image to border 0 and align left or right. But those attributes are now “deprecated,” so a few years back I switched to CSS, substituting a class attribute set to imgleft or imgright, specifying such things (and spacing as well). FWIW, while the platform allows resizing images, one’s not supposed to use html to resize images either. The height and width are there just to load more efficiently.

Well, we’ll see. I also have an a tag around images to invoke in href a script to add additional captions as popups if you click on an image. We’ll have to see if, in visual editing, moving an image moves with it competently such things, rather than ruins the page. It will take experimenting. But I’m still not convinced that the new editor is right for someone like me. It isn’t going away, but I still have my doubts about its virtues.

Some tips:

so a few years back I switched to CSS, substituting a class attribute set to imgleft or imgright, specifying such things (and spacing as well).

WordPress uses “alignleft”, “alignright”, and “aligncenter” classes. So if you adjust your theme to use those, then the built in alignment functionality will work for you.

FWIW, while the platform allows resizing images, one’s not supposed to use html to resize images either. The height and width are there just to load more efficiently.

WordPress does a neat trick called responsive images. Basically, when you upload an image, then WordPress makes several sizes of that image. Like 3-5 resized versions of it. Then, when you put the image on the page, the actual IMG tag contains data about every individual one of those images. This allows the browser to choose which image it shows based on things like the size the image is supposed to be on the page, the pixel display density of the screen, or whether it’s on a phone or not, or even if the connection it is using is fast or slow. Essentially, the height and width are now to tell the browser what size the image is on the page, and the browser chooses the best one to use based on its own conditions.

So, yeah, you don’t have to worry about that resizing thing anymore.

Basically, the web has come a long way and the editor in WordPress has kept up with it. The HTML it produces is probably better than what you do by hand, in a lot of ways.

What does Jetpack have to do with anything? And no, I don’t have that plugin installed.

@crazyserb You stated that the P tags were missing. I’ve seen that before, with an old version of Jetpack that was accidentally modifying how the editor worked incorrectly.

The P tags should be in the content when you’re using paragraph blocks.So if not, then something else is stripping them out for you. So, try to deactivate your other plugins and then save a post and see if the P tags are present properly.

Thanks very much. Quite interesting, especially about resizing. I imagine that my fear about moving a link to a script when I move an image may be overthinking, since WordPress must move a link when one moves a word that has one. But I’ll be experimenting, even if I still very much miss the old interface.

And yes, I see a loss of P tags, too, that’s hard to explain, especially as it is obviously specific to v5.0. (I imagine that, if the behavior ceased, I’d still have to re-add them as needed, although the posts are displaying ok.)

I have three security or anti-spam plugins and doubt that could be relevant. I also have the importer plugin from www.ads-software.com itself. I could imagine its interacting with tags, as it’s intended to import them, but also seems pretty basic or even essential, no?