WordPress is not so simple anymore

WordPress was about making sure that everyone from devs to newbies could create a website with little or no training. The old classic editor was simple, intuitive and just easy for pretty much everyone to use ( I even taught someone scared of the internet and with no clue about web design to use the classic editor). If you wanted a more in depth editor then you could easily download a plugin. Gutenberg has flipped this around making things that were simple and intuitive into something clunky, slow and not intuitive at all.

Most people who use WordPress are people who want to quickly knock out a blog or pages for their online store/website, if they wanted to have extra editing features then they would download a plugin to do this (I’m sorry to say but from reading a lot of reviews it seems there are far better options then Gutenberg). As a quick example of something that took ages for me to find; the permalink for a page was at the top hidden under a white section, why hide this? I mean it was just blank at the top of the page and then when I move the mouse over this area the permalink appeared, it really makes no sense.

I completely appreciate the work that has gone into this (I have a lot of respect for the devs as they offer their own time and wisdom to help sort issues, you can see from most of the responses that they are very passionate about getting this to work) but WordPress has always been about creating websites in a simple and easy way, this new core update really goes away from this, for me I feel that this should have stayed a plugin instead of adding to core. To stay up to date with security I have to update WordPress which means I also have to use another plugin ‘Classic Editor’ to go back to editing the simple way, everybody knows that the more plugins you run the slower the site so it seems crazy to have to add another plugin to remove a core feature especially one that slows down the writing process so much, breaking my flow and generally turning a 5 minute job into something that takes a lot longer.

Now I understand that things need to change and I have no issues with this as long as the change is for the better and makes my workflow quicker. Unfortunately Gutenberg only slows things down, its certainly not the intuitive editor that its pushed as. For something to be intuitive I shouldn’t have to spend hours trying to work out how to use it, when I first started using WordPress 7 years ago I was able to start creating content within minutes of looking at the classic editor, that’s because it really is intuitive, however this new Gutenberg editor is just too over engineered, keep it as a plugin and let people use it if they wish but don’t push it into the core.

Quick request for the WordPress devs:
If you are going to do an update that so drastically alters the core can this not be done at a quieter time of year? The beginning of December is a little crazy for us lot in the retail sector, I appreciate some will say there is never a good time but surely anytime is better than December.

Cheers
Sy

• This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by sy19.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by sy19.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by sy19.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by sy19.