It’s Not Ready

I was one of those people who hated the idea of Gutenberg, but I have since come around to accepting it is the future. So I put it onto a new brand new site to find out how useable it is, in its current form.

My conclusion is that if all you want to do is write text and headings and simple lists, Gutenberg is great. But if you want to add an image – you can’t do it via an external URL – only via the media library.

I usually only have 5 or 6 images in the media library as I prefer to host images externally. But now with Gutenberg there seems to be no other option than to use the media library. How did someone conclude it was OK to go live with Gutenberg when it’s incapable of sourcing images from external URLs? How can we get ready for Gutenberg as we must, when it works this hard to prevent us?

So I used the media library, than had to go looking online for fixes to enable all the buttons for images to work, including adding CSS to make images capable of being positioned centered and wide. Why go live without this?

Why is the editor only 610px wide? Not everyone does everything on a smartphone. I still build sites on a desktop computer. I don’t think I’m alone. If you have complex pages to write (I have one that consists of scores of long shortcodes), you have to revert to the Classic Text Editor in order to see what you’re doing. I tried adding the code I found in a github conversation to make the editor wider, but it didn’t work.

Sometimes you want to style a box around some content. I achieved this by adding a columns block, then changing it to be one column and adding other blocks inside it. I was able to style the outer block. But you try selecting the outer block once it contains other blocks. It’s a bit like trying to position a grain of sand in the precise middle of a football pitch. It takes ages as you hover around the area hoping, and eventually praying that you’ll manage to find the edge of the outer box and select it. Why make it so hard?

I made the mistake of using an inline image block only to later find it was impossible to select it to associate an image with it. The only way I could get rid of the empty block was to hit the undo key and make a mental note never to try that again.

I’ve only used about 7 of the blocks available and this is my impression so far. It’s not ready. What’s most puzzling to me is you have smart, experienced WordPress people building this but from what has been delivered you’d never know it. It’s as if they think bloggers and other WordPress users only write blog posts consisting of paragraphs of text on plain white backgrounds. No – we do more complex things than that and this editor, today can’t help us do it.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by diywebmastery.