I wanted to not like this after so long…

…but I have to be honest: it’s gotten way better, and I think it might be being held back a bit by how many of the lower reviews (which may have been more valid at the time) are from earlier days. Had I rated it then, I might have been one of the people posting it.

I found it, even just a couple months ago, so consistently buggy and unintuitive as to make it nearly unusable, or at best so anxiety-inducing and frustrating that I was planning on how best to confront all of my clients and prepare them with contingency plans for how best to accommodate the forced change.

That said, the past month or so, heck, even the past couple weeks, have brought it to a point of consistently working, and to practical design, that I have confidence that it’ll get to where it needs to go when the time is right.

There’s a sort of thing that happens when you set out to do business like this, and that is, you have an idea of what you think people will want and care about, and then you pare down to what you find out they actually *do* care about.

One of the things that consistently made me anxious is that, even if you didn’t “corrupt” an install with nagging bloatware and glitch-ridden stock themes that didn’t make use of the mechanisms WordPress already had by default, you had this wonderful core product that could be taught (as far as bare bones usability) in ten or fifteen minutes—but with an editor that couldn’t comfortable handle something as basic as two pictures side by side for a so-called “normal” non-tech savvy user.

All of which is to say, the option of having an easily accessible page-builder-like system is a welcome one. I’ve been so spoiled by things like Elementor because it makes sense to me and the way that -I- work and think that there are moments when you think of it (or whatever your favorite tools are) being made core to fill needs like that. But I’m not everyone, and while they’re not being positioned as competing products, there are people that swear by the way Gutenberg does things and find everything else to be madness.

So I can’t review it like that except to say, I have my preferences. I don’t like how inconsequential the button to add stuff is, or that when I click it, even in full screen, I have to hunt each time for the thing I want (sometimes docks are nice…collapsible isn’t an always-never thing, and maybe that’s even changed or going to change soon)….so I can mention things like that, but I wouldn’t necessarily rate down for it so much as report it.

I also don’t care for finding out the difference between back end and front end when that’s not strictly necessary, or trying to present the software overall as “hey, you can do it yourself” in a responsive world without being able to responsively change things without stylesheet edits (which makes sense to me in terms of separation of “powers” but which they won’t do). It’s just not necessary, but that’s a choice of Gutenberg, not a flaw, and it presents cleanly! I also like knowing what all my options are ahead of time, instead of finding them out in increments, and on its best day it’s still a hot mess to get drag and drop and the new handles to behave (but that’s most of these plugins, so it may be par for the course past a point).

Long story short, I am giving this a four to reward progress, and to offset the initial hate-stars for the greater good; I look forward to seeing the fruits of the continuing work toward more compatibility with existing themes/plugins/data structures. It’s a bit weird to rate something in progress, but it is here right now open to use and to scrutiny, so I’m just reviewing it right now, too.